pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Global Estimation of Building-Integrated Facade and Rooftop Photovoltaic Potential by Integrating 3D Building Footprint and Spatio-Temporal Datasets
Authors: Qing Yu, Kechuan Dong, Zhiling Guo, Jiaxing Li, Hongjun Tan, Yanxiu Jin, Jian Yuan, Haoran Zhang, Junwei Liu, Qi Chen, Jinyue Yan
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00

This research tackles the challenges of estimating Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) potential across various temporal and spatial scales, accounting for different geographical climates and urban morphology. We introduce a holistic methodology for evaluating BIPV potential, integrating 3D building footprint models with diverse meteorological data sources to account for dynamic shadow effects. The approach enables the assessment of PV potential on facades and rooftops at different levels-individual buildings, urban blocks, and cities globally. Through an analysis of 120 typical cities, we highlight the importance of 3D building forms, cityscape morphology, and geographic positioning in measuring BIPV potential at various levels. In particular, our simulation study reveals that among cities with optimal facade PV performance, the average ratio of facade PV potential to rooftop PV potential is approximately 68.2%. Additionally, approximately 17.5% of the analyzed samples demonstrate even higher facade PV potentials compared to rooftop installations. This finding underscores the strategic value of incorporating facade PV applications into urban sustainable energy systems.
Lossless and Privacy-Preserving Graph Convolution Network for Federated Item Recommendation
Authors: Guowei Wu, Weike Pan, Qiang Yang, Zhong Ming
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Privacy Preserving

Graph neural network (GNN) has emerged as a state-of-the-art solution for item recommendation. However, existing GNN-based recommendation methods rely on a centralized storage of fragmented user-item interaction sub-graphs and training on an aggregated global graph, which will lead to privacy concerns. As a response, some recent works develop GNN-based federated recommendation methods by exploiting decentralized and fragmented user-item sub-graphs in order to preserve user privacy. However, due to privacy constraints, the graph convolution process in existing federated recommendation methods is incomplete compared with the centralized counterpart, causing a degradation of the recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel lossless and privacy-preserving graph convolution network (LP-GCN), which fully completes the graph convolution process with decentralized user-item interaction sub-graphs while ensuring privacy. It is worth mentioning that its performance is equivalent to that of the non-federated (i.e., centralized) counterpart. Moreover, we validate its effectiveness through both theoretical analysis and empirical studies. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that our LP-GCN outperforms the existing federated recommendation methods. The code will be publicly available once the paper is accepted.
Precision Profile Pollution Attack on Sequential Recommenders via Influence Function
Authors: Xiaoyu Du, Yingying Chen, Yang Zhang, Jinhui Tang
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation approaches have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in modeling user preferences. Nevertheless, they are susceptible to profile pollution attacks (PPA), wherein items are introduced into a user's interaction history deliberately to influence the recommendation list. Since retraining the model for each polluted item is time-consuming, recent PPAs estimate item influence based on gradient directions to identify the most effective attack candidates. However, the actual item representations diverge significantly from the gradients, resulting in disparate outcomes.To tackle this challenge, we introduce an INFluence Function-based Attack approach INFAttack that offers a more accurate estimation of the influence of polluting items. Specifically, we calculate the modifications to the original model using the influence function when generating polluted sequences by introducing specific items. Subsequently, we choose the sequence that has been most significantly influenced to substitute the original sequence, thus promoting the target item. Comprehensive experiments conducted on five real-world datasets illustrate that INFAttack surpasses all baseline methods and consistently delivers stable attack performance for both popular and unpopular items.
Patent-publication pairs for the detection of knowledge transfer from research to industry: reducing ambiguities with word embeddings and references
Authors: Klaus Lippert, Konrad U. Förstner
Date: 2024-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: text similarity, Transfer Learning, valid, Word Embeddings

The performance of medical research can be viewed and evaluated not only from the perspective of publication output, but also from the perspective of economic exploitability. Patents can represent the exploitation of research results and thus the transfer of knowledge from research to industry. In this study, we set out to identify publication-patent pairs in order to use patents as a proxy for the economic impact of research. To identify these pairs, we matched scholarly publications and patents by comparing the names of authors and investors. To resolve the ambiguities that arise in this name-matching process, we expanded our approach with two additional filter features, one used to assess the similarity of text content, the other to identify common references in the two document types. To evaluate text similarity, we extracted and transformed technical terms from a medical ontology (MeSH) into numerical vectors using word embeddings. We then calculated the results of the two supporting features over an example five-year period. Furthermore, we developed a statistical procedure which can be used to determine valid patent classes for the domain of medicine. Our complete data processing pipeline is freely available, from the raw data of the two document types right through to the validated publication-patent pairs.
Oracle-guided Dynamic User Preference Modeling for Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Jiafeng Xia, Dongsheng Li, Hansu Gu, Tun Lu, Peng Zhang, Li Shang, Ning Gu
Date: 2024-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation methods can capture dynamic user preferences from user historical interactions to achieve better performance. However, most existing methods only use past information extracted from user historical interactions to train the models, leading to the deviations of user preference modeling. Besides past information, future information is also available during training, which contains the ``oracle'' user preferences in the future and will be beneficial to model dynamic user preferences. Therefore, we propose an oracle-guided dynamic user preference modeling method for sequential recommendation (Oracle4Rec), which leverages future information to guide model training on past information, aiming to learn ``forward-looking'' models. Specifically, Oracle4Rec first extracts past and future information through two separate encoders, then learns a forward-looking model through an oracle-guiding module which minimizes the discrepancy between past and future information. We also tailor a two-phase model training strategy to make the guiding more effective. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Oracle4Rec is superior to state-of-the-art sequential methods. Further experiments show that Oracle4Rec can be leveraged as a generic module in other sequential recommendation methods to improve their performance with a considerable margin.
Scaling New Frontiers: Insights into Large Recommendation Models
Authors: Wei Guo, Hao Wang, Luankang Zhang, Jin Yao Chin, Zhongzhou Liu, Kai Cheng, Qiushi Pan, Yi Quan Lee, Wanqi Xue, Tingjia Shen, Kenan Song, Kefan Wang, Wenjia Xie, Yuyang Ye, Huifeng Guo, Yong liu, Defu Lian, Ruiming Tang, Enhong Chen
Date: 2024-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems are essential for filtering data and retrieving relevant information across various applications. Recent advancements have seen these systems incorporate increasingly large embedding tables, scaling up to tens of terabytes for industrial use. However, the expansion of network parameters in traditional recommendation models has plateaued at tens of millions, limiting further benefits from increased embedding parameters. Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs), a new approach has emerged that scales network parameters using innovative structures, enabling continued performance improvements. A significant development in this area is Meta's generative recommendation model HSTU, which illustrates the scaling laws of recommendation systems by expanding parameters to thousands of billions. This new paradigm has achieved substantial performance gains in online experiments. In this paper, we aim to enhance the understanding of scaling laws by conducting comprehensive evaluations of large recommendation models. Firstly, we investigate the scaling laws across different backbone architectures of the large recommendation models. Secondly, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies to explore the origins of these scaling laws. We then further assess the performance of HSTU, as the representative of large recommendation models, on complex user behavior modeling tasks to evaluate its applicability. Notably, we also analyze its effectiveness in ranking tasks for the first time. Finally, we offer insights into future directions for large recommendation models. Supplementary materials for our research are available on GitHub at https://github.com/USTC-StarTeam/Large-Recommendation-Models.
Needle: A Generative AI-Powered Multi-modal Database for Answering Complex Natural Language Queries
Authors: Mahdi Erfanian, Mohsen Dehghankar, Abolfazl Asudeh
Date: 2024-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Retrieval, Natural Language Queries, Retrieval, Synthetic Data Generation

Multi-modal datasets, like those involving images, often miss the detailed descriptions that properly capture the rich information encoded in each item. This makes answering complex natural language queries a major challenge in this domain. In particular, unlike the traditional nearest neighbor search, where the tuples and the query are represented as points in a single metric space, these settings involve queries and tuples embedded in fundamentally different spaces, making the traditional query answering methods inapplicable. Existing literature addresses this challenge for image datasets through vector representations jointly trained on natural language and images. This technique, however, underperforms for complex queries due to various reasons. This paper takes a step towards addressing this challenge by introducing a Generative-based Monte Carlo method that utilizes foundation models to generate synthetic samples that capture the complexity of the natural language query and represent it in the same metric space as the multi-modal data. Following this method, we propose Needle, a database for image data retrieval. Instead of relying on contrastive learning or metadata-searching approaches, our system is based on synthetic data generation to capture the complexities of natural language queries. Our system is open-source and ready for deployment, designed to be easily adopted by researchers and developers. The comprehensive experiments on various benchmark datasets verify that this system significantly outperforms state-of-the-art text-to-image retrieval methods in the literature. Any foundation model and embedder can be easily integrated into Needle to improve the performance, piggybacking on the advancements in these technologies.
The Impact of Generative AI on Student Churn and the Future of Formal Education
Authors: Stephen Elbourn
Date: 2024-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

In the contemporary educational landscape, the advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents unprecedented opportunities for personalised learning, fundamentally challenging the traditional paradigms of education. This research explores the emerging trend where high school students, empowered by tailored educational experiences provided by Generative AI, opt to forgo traditional university degrees to pursue entrepreneurial ventures at a younger age. To understand and predict the future of education in the age of Generative AI, we employ a comprehensive methodology to analyse social media data. Our approach includes sentiment analysis to gauge public opinion, topic modelling to identify key themes and emerging trends, and user demographic analysis to understand the engagement of different age groups and regions. We also perform influencer analysis to identify key figures shaping the discourse and engagement metrics to measure the level of interest and interaction with AI-related educational content. Content analysis helps us to determine the types of content being shared and the prevalent narratives, while hashtag analysis reveals the connectivity of discussions. The temporal analysis tracks changes over time and identifies event-based spikes in discussions. The insights derived from this analysis include the acceptance and adoption of Generative AI in education, its impact on traditional education models, the influence on students' entrepreneurial ambitions, and the educational outcomes associated with AI-driven personalised learning. Additionally, we explore public sentiment towards policies and regulations and use predictive modelling to forecast future trends. This comprehensive social media analysis provides a nuanced understanding of the evolving educational landscape, offering valuable perspectives on the role of Generative AI in shaping the future of education.
Contextual Bandits in Payment Processing: Non-uniform Exploration and Supervised Learning at Adyen
Authors: Akhila Vangara, Alex Egg
Date: 2024-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits, regression

Uniform random exploration in decision-making systems supports off-policy learning via supervision but incurs high regret, making it impractical for many applications. Conversely, non-uniform exploration offers better immediate performance but lacks support for off-policy learning. Recent research suggests that regression oracles can bridge this gap by combining non-uniform exploration with supervised learning. In this paper, we analyze these approaches within a real-world industrial context at Adyen, a large global payments processor characterized by batch logged delayed feedback, short-term memory, and dynamic action spaces under the Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) framework. Our analysis reveals that while regression oracles significantly improve performance, they introduce challenges due to rigid algorithmic assumptions. Specifically, we observe that as a policy improves, subsequent generations may perform worse due to shifts in the reward distribution and increased class imbalance in the training data. This degradation occurs de spite improvements in other aspects of the training data, leading to decreased performance in successive policy iterations. We further explore the long-term impact of regression oracles, identifying a potential "oscillation effect." This effect arises when regression oracles influence probability estimates and the realizability of subsequent policy models, leading to fluctuations in performance across iterations. Our findings highlight the need for more adaptable algorithms that can leverage the benefits of regression oracles without introducing instability in policy performance over time.
Rank It, Then Ask It: Input Reranking for Maximizing the Performance of LLMs on Symmetric Tasks
Authors: Mohsen Dehghankar, Abolfazl Asudeh
Date: 2024-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Reranking

Large language models (LLMs) have quickly emerged as practical and versatile tools that provide new solutions for a wide range of domains. In this paper, we consider the application of LLMs on symmetric tasks where a query is asked on an (unordered) bag of elements. Examples of such tasks include answering aggregate queries on a database table. In general, when the bag contains a large number of elements, LLMs tend to overlook some elements, leading to challenges in generating accurate responses to the query. LLMs receive their inputs as ordered sequences. However, in this problem, we leverage the fact that the symmetric input is not ordered, and reordering should not affect the LLM's response. Observing that LLMs are less likely to miss elements at certain positions of the input, we introduce the problem of LLM input reranking: to find a ranking of the input that maximizes the LLM's accuracy for the given query without making explicit assumptions about the query. Finding the optimal ranking requires identifying (i) the relevance of each input element for answering the query and (ii) the importance of each rank position for the LLM's attention. We develop algorithms for estimating these values efficiently utilizing a helper LLM. We conduct comprehensive experiments on different synthetic and real datasets to validate our proposal and to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms. Our experiments confirm that our reranking approach improves the accuracy of the LLMs on symmetric tasks by up to $99\%$ proximity to the optimum upper bound.
CDEMapper: Enhancing NIH Common Data Element Normalization using Large Language Models
Authors: Yan Wang, Jimin Huang, Huan He, Vincent Zhang, Yujia Zhou, Xubing Hao, Pritham Ram, Lingfei Qian, Qianqian Xie, Ruey-Ling Weng, Fongci Lin, Yan Hu, Licong Cui, Xiaoqian Jiang, Hua Xu, Na Hong
Date: 2024-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model

Common Data Elements (CDEs) standardize data collection and sharing across studies, enhancing data interoperability and improving research reproducibility. However, implementing CDEs presents challenges due to the broad range and variety of data elements. This study aims to develop an effective and efficient mapping tool to bridge the gap between local data elements and National Institutes of Health (NIH) CDEs. We propose CDEMapper, a large language model (LLM) powered mapping tool designed to assist in mapping local data elements to NIH CDEs. CDEMapper has three core modules: (1) CDE indexing and embeddings. NIH CDEs were indexed and embedded to support semantic search; (2) CDE recommendations. The tool combines Elasticsearch (BM25 similarity methods) with state of the art GPT services to recommend candidate CDEs and their permissible values; and (3) Human review. Users review and select the NIH CDEs and values that best match their data elements and value sets. We evaluate the tool recommendation accuracy against manually annotated mapping results. CDEMapper offers a publicly available, LLM-powered, and intuitive user interface that consolidates essential and advanced mapping services into a streamlined pipeline. It provides a step by step, quality assured mapping workflow designed with a user-centered approach. The evaluation results demonstrated that augmenting BM25 with GPT embeddings and a ranker consistently enhances CDEMapper mapping accuracy in three different mapping settings across four evaluation datasets. This work opens up the potential of using LLMs to assist with CDE recommendation and human curation when aligning local data elements with NIH CDEs. Additionally, this effort enhances clinical research data interoperability and helps researchers better understand the gaps between local data elements and NIH CDEs.
FairSort: Learning to Fair Rank for Personalized Recommendations in Two-Sided Platforms
Authors: Guoli Wu, Zhiyong Feng, Shizhan Chen, Hongyue Wu, Xiao Xue, Jianmao Xiao, Guodong Fan, Hongqi Chen, Jingyu Li
Date: 2024-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Recommendation Systems, Re-Ranking

Traditional recommendation systems focus on maximizing user satisfaction by suggesting their favourite items. This user-centric approach may lead to unfair exposure distribution among the providers. On the contrary, a provider-centric design might become unfair to the users. Therefore, this paper proposes a re-ranking model FairSort to find a trade-off solution among user-side fairness, provider-side fairness, and personalized recommendations utility. Previous works habitually treat this issue as a knapsack problem, incorporating both-side fairness as constraints. In this paper, we adopt a novel perspective, treating each recommendation list as a runway rather than a knapsack. In this perspective, each item on the runway gains a velocity and runs within a specific time, achieving re-ranking for both-side fairness. Meanwhile, we ensure the Minimum Utility Guarantee for personalized recommendations by designing a Binary Search approach. This can provide more reliable recommendations compared to the conventional greedy strategy based on the knapsack problem. We further broaden the applicability of FairSort, designing two versions for online and offline recommendation scenarios. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on real-world datasets indicate that FairSort can ensure more reliable personalized recommendations while considering fairness for both the provider and user.
Table Integration in Data Lakes Unleashed: Pairwise Integrability Judgment, Integrable Set Discovery, and Multi-Tuple Conflict Resolution
Authors: Daomin Ji, Hui Luo, Zhifeng Bao, Shane Culpepper
Date: 2024-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection, Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, In-Context Learning

Table integration aims to create a comprehensive table by consolidating tuples containing relevant information. In this work, we investigate the challenge of integrating multiple tables from a data lake, focusing on three core tasks: 1) pairwise integrability judgment, which determines whether a tuple pair is integrable, accounting for any occurrences of semantic equivalence or typographical errors; 2) integrable set discovery, which identifies all integrable sets in a table based on pairwise integrability judgments established in the first task; 3) multi-tuple conflict resolution, which resolves conflicts between multiple tuples during integration. To this end, we train a binary classifier to address the task of pairwise integrability judgment. Given the scarcity of labeled data in data lakes, we propose a self-supervised adversarial contrastive learning algorithm to perform classification, which incorporates data augmentation methods and adversarial examples to autonomously generate new training data. Upon the output of pairwise integrability judgment, each integrable set can be considered as a community, a densely connected sub-graph where nodes and edges correspond to tuples in the table and their pairwise integrability respectively, we proceed to investigate various community detection algorithms to address the integrable set discovery objective. Moving forward to tackle multi-tuple conflict resolution, we introduce an innovative in-context learning methodology. This approach capitalizes on the knowledge embedded within large language models (LLMs) to effectively resolve conflicts that arise when integrating multiple tuples. Notably, our method minimizes the need for annotated data, making it particularly suited for scenarios where labeled datasets are scarce.