pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Teach LLMs to Personalize -- An Approach inspired by Writing Education
Authors: Cheng Li, Mingyang Zhang, Qiaozhu Mei, Yaqing Wang, Spurthi Amba Hombaiah, Yi Liang, Michael Bendersky
Date: 2023-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Text Generation

Personalized text generation is an emerging research area that has attracted much attention in recent years. Most studies in this direction focus on a particular domain by designing bespoke features or models. In this work, we propose a general approach for personalized text generation using large language models (LLMs). Inspired by the practice of writing education, we develop a multistage and multitask framework to teach LLMs for personalized generation. In writing instruction, the task of writing from sources is often decomposed into multiple steps that involve finding, evaluating, summarizing, synthesizing, and integrating information. Analogously, our approach to personalized text generation consists of multiple stages: retrieval, ranking, summarization, synthesis, and generation. In addition, we introduce a multitask setting that helps the model improve its generation ability further, which is inspired by the observation in education that a student's reading proficiency and writing ability are often correlated. We evaluate our approach on three public datasets, each of which covers a different and representative domain. Our results show significant improvements over a variety of baselines.
Improving CTC-AED model with integrated-CTC and auxiliary loss regularization
Authors: Daobin Zhu, Xiangdong Su, Hongbin Zhang
Date: 2023-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Decoder, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Connectionist temporal classification (CTC) and attention-based encoder decoder (AED) joint training has been widely applied in automatic speech recognition (ASR). Unlike most hybrid models that separately calculate the CTC and AED losses, our proposed integrated-CTC utilizes the attention mechanism of AED to guide the output of CTC. In this paper, we employ two fusion methods, namely direct addition of logits (DAL) and preserving the maximum probability (PMP). We achieve dimensional consistency by adaptively affine transforming the attention results to match the dimensions of CTC. To accelerate model convergence and improve accuracy, we introduce auxiliary loss regularization for accelerated convergence. Experimental results demonstrate that the DAL method performs better in attention rescoring, while the PMP method excels in CTC prefix beam search and greedy search.
Automated Testing and Improvement of Named Entity Recognition Systems
Authors: Boxi Yu, Yiyan Hu, Qiuyang Mang, Wenhan Hu, Pinjia He
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis

Named entity recognition (NER) systems have seen rapid progress in recent years due to the development of deep neural networks. These systems are widely used in various natural language processing applications, such as information extraction, question answering, and sentiment analysis. However, the complexity and intractability of deep neural networks can make NER systems unreliable in certain circumstances, resulting in incorrect predictions. For example, NER systems may misidentify female names as chemicals or fail to recognize the names of minority groups, leading to user dissatisfaction. To tackle this problem, we introduce TIN, a novel, widely applicable approach for automatically testing and repairing various NER systems. The key idea for automated testing is that the NER predictions of the same named entities under similar contexts should be identical. The core idea for automated repairing is that similar named entities should have the same NER prediction under the same context. We use TIN to test two SOTA NER models and two commercial NER APIs, i.e., Azure NER and AWS NER. We manually verify 784 of the suspicious issues reported by TIN and find that 702 are erroneous issues, leading to high precision (85.0%-93.4%) across four categories of NER errors: omission, over-labeling, incorrect category, and range error. For automated repairing, TIN achieves a high error reduction rate (26.8%-50.6%) over the four systems under test, which successfully repairs 1,056 out of the 1,877 reported NER errors.
Evaluating Picture Description Speech for Dementia Detection using Image-text Alignment
Authors: Youxiang Zhu, Nana Lin, Xiaohui Liang, John A. Batsis, Robert M. Roth, Brian MacWhinney
Date: 2023-08-11 00:00:00

Using picture description speech for dementia detection has been studied for 30 years. Despite the long history, previous models focus on identifying the differences in speech patterns between healthy subjects and patients with dementia but do not utilize the picture information directly. In this paper, we propose the first dementia detection models that take both the picture and the description texts as inputs and incorporate knowledge from large pre-trained image-text alignment models. We observe the difference between dementia and healthy samples in terms of the text's relevance to the picture and the focused area of the picture. We thus consider such a difference could be used to enhance dementia detection accuracy. Specifically, we use the text's relevance to the picture to rank and filter the sentences of the samples. We also identified focused areas of the picture as topics and categorized the sentences according to the focused areas. We propose three advanced models that pre-processed the samples based on their relevance to the picture, sub-image, and focused areas. The evaluation results show that our advanced models, with knowledge of the picture and large image-text alignment models, achieve state-of-the-art performance with the best detection accuracy at 83.44%, which is higher than the text-only baseline model at 79.91%. Lastly, we visualize the sample and picture results to explain the advantages of our models.
Conceptualizing Machine Learning for Dynamic Information Retrieval of Electronic Health Record Notes
Authors: Sharon Jiang, Shannon Shen, Monica Agrawal, Barbara Lam, Nicholas Kurtzman, Steven Horng, David Karger, David Sontag
Date: 2023-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

The large amount of time clinicians spend sifting through patient notes and documenting in electronic health records (EHRs) is a leading cause of clinician burnout. By proactively and dynamically retrieving relevant notes during the documentation process, we can reduce the effort required to find relevant patient history. In this work, we conceptualize the use of EHR audit logs for machine learning as a source of supervision of note relevance in a specific clinical context, at a particular point in time. Our evaluation focuses on the dynamic retrieval in the emergency department, a high acuity setting with unique patterns of information retrieval and note writing. We show that our methods can achieve an AUC of 0.963 for predicting which notes will be read in an individual note writing session. We additionally conduct a user study with several clinicians and find that our framework can help clinicians retrieve relevant information more efficiently. Demonstrating that our framework and methods can perform well in this demanding setting is a promising proof of concept that they will translate to other clinical settings and data modalities (e.g., labs, medications, imaging).
TBIN: Modeling Long Textual Behavior Data for CTR Prediction
Authors: Shuwei Chen, Xiang Li, Jian Dong, Jin Zhang, Yongkang Wang, Xingxing Wang
Date: 2023-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Chunking, Click-Through Rate Prediction, Food recommendation, Prediction

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays a pivotal role in the success of recommendations. Inspired by the recent thriving of language models (LMs), a surge of works improve prediction by organizing user behavior data in a \textbf{textual} format and using LMs to understand user interest at a semantic level. While promising, these works have to truncate the textual data to reduce the quadratic computational overhead of self-attention in LMs. However, it has been studied that long user behavior data can significantly benefit CTR prediction. In addition, these works typically condense user diverse interests into a single feature vector, which hinders the expressive capability of the model. In this paper, we propose a \textbf{T}extual \textbf{B}ehavior-based \textbf{I}nterest Chunking \textbf{N}etwork (TBIN), which tackles the above limitations by combining an efficient locality-sensitive hashing algorithm and a shifted chunk-based self-attention. The resulting user diverse interests are dynamically activated, producing user interest representation towards the target item. Finally, the results of both offline and online experiments on real-world food recommendation platform demonstrate the effectiveness of TBIN.
Expressivity of Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Manjot Singh, Adalbert Fono, Gitta Kutyniok
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00

The synergy between spiking neural networks and neuromorphic hardware holds promise for the development of energy-efficient AI applications. Inspired by this potential, we revisit the foundational aspects to study the capabilities of spiking neural networks where information is encoded in the firing time of neurons. Under the Spike Response Model as a mathematical model of a spiking neuron with a linear response function, we compare the expressive power of artificial and spiking neural networks, where we initially show that they realize piecewise linear mappings. In contrast to ReLU networks, we prove that spiking neural networks can realize both continuous and discontinuous functions. Moreover, we provide complexity bounds on the size of spiking neural networks to emulate multi-layer (ReLU) neural networks. Restricting to the continuous setting, we also establish complexity bounds in the reverse direction for one-layer spiking neural networks.
A Bi-Step Grounding Paradigm for Large Language Models in Recommendation Systems
Authors: Keqin Bao, Jizhi Zhang, Wenjie Wang, Yang Zhang, Zhengyi Yang, Yancheng Luo, Chong Chen, Fuli Feng, Qi Tian
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems

As the focus on Large Language Models (LLMs) in the field of recommendation intensifies, the optimization of LLMs for recommendation purposes (referred to as LLM4Rec) assumes a crucial role in augmenting their effectiveness in providing recommendations. However, existing approaches for LLM4Rec often assess performance using restricted sets of candidates, which may not accurately reflect the models' overall ranking capabilities. In this paper, our objective is to investigate the comprehensive ranking capacity of LLMs and propose a two-step grounding framework known as BIGRec (Bi-step Grounding Paradigm for Recommendation). It initially grounds LLMs to the recommendation space by fine-tuning them to generate meaningful tokens for items and subsequently identifies appropriate actual items that correspond to the generated tokens. By conducting extensive experiments on two datasets, we substantiate the superior performance, capacity for handling few-shot scenarios, and versatility across multiple domains exhibited by BIGRec. Furthermore, we observe that the marginal benefits derived from increasing the quantity of training samples are modest for BIGRec, implying that LLMs possess the limited capability to assimilate statistical information, such as popularity and collaborative filtering, due to their robust semantic priors. These findings also underline the efficacy of integrating diverse statistical information into the LLM4Rec framework, thereby pointing towards a potential avenue for future research. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/SAI990323/Grounding4Rec.
Phase Retrieval with Background Information: Decreased References and Efficient Methods
Authors: Ziyang Yuan, Haoxing Yang, Ningyi Leng, Hongxia Wang
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Fourier phase retrieval(PR) is a severely ill-posed inverse problem that arises in various applications. To guarantee a unique solution and relieve the dependence on the initialization, background information can be exploited as a structural priors. However, the requirement for the background information may be challenging when moving to the high-resolution imaging. At the same time, the previously proposed projected gradient descent(PGD) method also demands much background information. In this paper, we present an improved theoretical result about the demand for the background information, along with two Douglas Rachford(DR) based methods. Analytically, we demonstrate that the background required to ensure a unique solution can be decreased by nearly $1/2$ for the 2-D signals compared to the 1-D signals. By generalizing the results into $d$-dimension, we show that the length of the background information more than $(2^{\frac{d+1}{d}}-1)$ folds of the signal is sufficient to ensure the uniqueness. At the same time, we also analyze the stability and robustness of the model when measurements and background information are corrupted by the noise. Furthermore, two methods called Background Douglas-Rachford (BDR) and Convex Background Douglas-Rachford (CBDR) are proposed. BDR which is a kind of non-convex method is proven to have the local R-linear convergence rate under mild assumptions. Instead, CBDR method uses the techniques of convexification and can be proven to own a global convergence guarantee as long as the background information is sufficient. To support this, a new property called F-RIP is established. We test the performance of the proposed methods through simulations as well as real experimental measurements, and demonstrate that they achieve a higher recovery rate with less background information compared to the PGD method.
Uncovering User Interest from Biased and Noised Watch Time in Video Recommendation
Authors: Haiyuan Zhao, Lei Zhang, Jun Xu, Guohao Cai, Zhenhua Dong, Ji-Rong Wen
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00

In the video recommendation, watch time is commonly adopted as an indicator of user interest. However, watch time is not only influenced by the matching of users' interests but also by other factors, such as duration bias and noisy watching. Duration bias refers to the tendency for users to spend more time on videos with longer durations, regardless of their actual interest level. Noisy watching, on the other hand, describes users taking time to determine whether they like a video or not, which can result in users spending time watching videos they do not like. Consequently, the existence of duration bias and noisy watching make watch time an inadequate label for indicating user interest. Furthermore, current methods primarily address duration bias and ignore the impact of noisy watching, which may limit their effectiveness in uncovering user interest from watch time. In this study, we first analyze the generation mechanism of users' watch time from a unified causal viewpoint. Specifically, we considered the watch time as a mixture of the user's actual interest level, the duration-biased watch time, and the noisy watch time. To mitigate both the duration bias and noisy watching, we propose Debiased and Denoised watch time Correction (D$^2$Co), which can be divided into two steps: First, we employ a duration-wise Gaussian Mixture Model plus frequency-weighted moving average for estimating the bias and noise terms; then we utilize a sensitivity-controlled correction function to separate the user interest from the watch time, which is robust to the estimation error of bias and noise terms. The experiments on two public video recommendation datasets and online A/B testing indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
CDR: Conservative Doubly Robust Learning for Debiased Recommendation
Authors: Zijie Song, Jiawei Chen, Sheng Zhou, Qihao Shi, Yan Feng, Chun Chen, Can Wang
Date: 2023-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation, Recommendation Systems

In recommendation systems (RS), user behavior data is observational rather than experimental, resulting in widespread bias in the data. Consequently, tackling bias has emerged as a major challenge in the field of recommendation systems. Recently, Doubly Robust Learning (DR) has gained significant attention due to its remarkable performance and robust properties. However, our experimental findings indicate that existing DR methods are severely impacted by the presence of so-called Poisonous Imputation, where the imputation significantly deviates from the truth and becomes counterproductive. To address this issue, this work proposes Conservative Doubly Robust strategy (CDR) which filters imputations by scrutinizing their mean and variance. Theoretical analyses show that CDR offers reduced variance and improved tail bounds.In addition, our experimental investigations illustrate that CDR significantly enhances performance and can indeed reduce the frequency of poisonous imputation.
CSPM: A Contrastive Spatiotemporal Preference Model for CTR Prediction in On-Demand Food Delivery Services
Authors: Guyu Jiang, Xiaoyun Li, Rongrong Jing, Ruoqi Zhao, Xingliang Ni, Guodong Cao, Ning Hu
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial task in the context of an online on-demand food delivery (OFD) platform for precisely estimating the probability of a user clicking on food items. Unlike universal e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Amazon, user behaviors and interests on the OFD platform are more location and time-sensitive due to limited delivery ranges and regional commodity supplies. However, existing CTR prediction algorithms in OFD scenarios concentrate on capturing interest from historical behavior sequences, which fails to effectively model the complex spatiotemporal information within features, leading to poor performance. To address this challenge, this paper introduces the Contrastive Sres under different search states using three modules: contrastive spatiotemporal representation learning (CSRL), spatiotemporal preference extractor (StPE), and spatiotemporal information filter (StIF). CSRL utilizes a contrastive learning framework to generate a spatiotemporal activation representation (SAR) for the search action. StPE employs SAR to activate users' diverse preferences related to location and time from the historical behavior sequence field, using a multi-head attention mechanism. StIF incorporates SAR into a gating network to automatically capture important features with latent spatiotemporal effects. Extensive experiments conducted on two large-scale industrial datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CSPM. Notably, CSPM has been successfully deployed in Alibaba's online OFD platform Ele.me, resulting in a significant 0.88% lift in CTR, which has substantial business implications.
Understanding User Intent Modeling for Conversational Recommender Systems: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Siamak Farshidi, Kiyan Rezaee, Sara Mazaheri, Amir Hossein Rahimi, Ali Dadashzadeh, Morteza Ziabakhsh, Sadegh Eskandari, Slinger Jansen
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection, Recommendation Systems, Systematic Literature Review

Context: User intent modeling is a crucial process in Natural Language Processing that aims to identify the underlying purpose behind a user's request, enabling personalized responses. With a vast array of approaches introduced in the literature (over 13,000 papers in the last decade), understanding the related concepts and commonly used models in AI-based systems is essential. Method: We conducted a systematic literature review to gather data on models typically employed in designing conversational recommender systems. From the collected data, we developed a decision model to assist researchers in selecting the most suitable models for their systems. Additionally, we performed two case studies to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed decision model. Results: Our study analyzed 59 distinct models and identified 74 commonly used features. We provided insights into potential model combinations, trends in model selection, quality concerns, evaluation measures, and frequently used datasets for training and evaluating these models. Contribution: Our study contributes practical insights and a comprehensive understanding of user intent modeling, empowering the development of more effective and personalized conversational recommender systems. With the Conversational Recommender System, researchers can perform a more systematic and efficient assessment of fitting intent modeling frameworks.
Probabilistic Black-Box Checking via Active MDP Learning
Authors: Junya Shijubo, Masaki Waga, Kohei Suenaga
Date: 2023-07-15 00:00:00

We introduce a novel methodology for testing stochastic black-box systems, frequently encountered in embedded systems. Our approach enhances the established black-box checking (BBC) technique to address stochastic behavior. Traditional BBC primarily involves iteratively identifying an input that breaches the system's specifications by executing the following three phases: the learning phase to construct an automaton approximating the black box's behavior, the synthesis phase to identify a candidate counterexample from the learned automaton, and the validation phase to validate the obtained candidate counterexample and the learned automaton against the original black-box system. Our method, ProbBBC, refines the conventional BBC approach by (1) employing an active Markov Decision Process (MDP) learning method during the learning phase, (2) incorporating probabilistic model checking in the synthesis phase, and (3) applying statistical hypothesis testing in the validation phase. ProbBBC uniquely integrates these techniques rather than merely substituting each method in the traditional BBC; for instance, the statistical hypothesis testing and the MDP learning procedure exchange information regarding the black-box system's observation with one another. The experiment results suggest that ProbBBC outperforms an existing method, especially for systems with limited observation.
Demo: Reconfigurable Distributed Antennas and Reflecting Surface (RDARS)-aided Integrated Sensing and Communication System
Authors: Jintao Wang, Chengwang Ji, Jiajia Guo, Shaodan Ma
Date: 2023-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Integrated sensing and communication, ISAC

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system has been envisioned as a promising technology to be applied in future applications requiring both communication and high-accuracy sensing. Different from most research focusing on theoretical analysis and optimization in the area of ISAC, we implement a reconfigurable distributed antennas and reflecting surfaces (RDARS)-aided ISAC system prototype to achieve the dual-functionalities with the communication signal. A RDARS, composed of programmable elements capable of switching between reflection mode and connected mode, is introduced to assist in uplink signal transmission and sensing. The developed RDARS-aided ISAC prototype achieves reliable user localization without compromising the communication rate, showcasing its potential for future 6G systems.