pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Cross-Domain Latent Factors Sharing via Implicit Matrix Factorization
Authors: Abdulaziz Samra, Evgeney Frolov, Alexey Vasilev, Alexander Grigorievskiy, Anton Vakhrushev
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Data sparsity has been one of the long-standing problems for recommender systems. One of the solutions to mitigate this issue is to exploit knowledge available in other source domains. However, many cross-domain recommender systems introduce a complex architecture that makes them less scalable in practice. On the other hand, matrix factorization methods are still considered to be strong baselines for single-domain recommendations. In this paper, we introduce the CDIMF, a model that extends the standard implicit matrix factorization with ALS to cross-domain scenarios. We apply the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers to learn shared latent factors for overlapped users while factorizing the interaction matrix. In a dual-domain setting, experiments on industrial datasets demonstrate a competing performance of CDIMF for both cold-start and warm-start. The proposed model can outperform most other recent cross-domain and single-domain models. We also provide the code to reproduce experiments on GitHub.
Stalactite: Toolbox for Fast Prototyping of Vertical Federated Learning Systems
Authors: Anastasiia Zakharova, Dmitriy Alexandrov, Maria Khodorchenko, Nikolay Butakov, Alexey Vasilev, Maxim Savchenko, Alexander Grigorievskiy
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Vertical Federated Learning

Machine learning (ML) models trained on datasets owned by different organizations and physically located in remote databases offer benefits in many real-world use cases. State regulations or business requirements often prevent data transfer to a central location, making it difficult to utilize standard machine learning algorithms. Federated Learning (FL) is a technique that enables models to learn from distributed datasets without revealing the original data. Vertical Federated learning (VFL) is a type of FL where data samples are divided by features across several data owners. For instance, in a recommendation task, a user can interact with various sets of items, and the logs of these interactions are stored by different organizations. In this demo paper, we present \emph{Stalactite} - an open-source framework for VFL that provides the necessary functionality for building prototypes of VFL systems. It has several advantages over the existing frameworks. In particular, it allows researchers to focus on the algorithmic side rather than engineering and to easily deploy learning in a distributed environment. It implements several VFL algorithms and has a built-in homomorphic encryption layer. We demonstrate its use on a real-world recommendation datasets.
Beauty Beyond Words: Explainable Beauty Product Recommendations Using Ingredient-Based Product Attributes
Authors: Siliang Liu, Rahul Suresh, Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi
Date: 2024-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Attribute Extraction

Accurate attribute extraction is critical for beauty product recommendations and building trust with customers. This remains an open problem, as existing solutions are often unreliable and incomplete. We present a system to extract beauty-specific attributes using end-to-end supervised learning based on beauty product ingredients. A key insight to our system is a novel energy-based implicit model architecture. We show that this implicit model architecture offers significant benefits in terms of accuracy, explainability, robustness, and flexibility. Furthermore, our implicit model can be easily fine-tuned to incorporate additional attributes as they become available, making it more useful in real-world applications. We validate our model on a major e-commerce skincare product catalog dataset and demonstrate its effectiveness. Finally, we showcase how ingredient-based attribute extraction contributes to enhancing the explainability of beauty recommendations.
Advancing Event Causality Identification via Heuristic Semantic Dependency Inquiry Network
Authors: Haoran Li, Qiang Gao, Hongmei Wu, Li Huang
Date: 2024-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Causality Identification

Event Causality Identification (ECI) focuses on extracting causal relations between events in texts. Existing methods for ECI primarily rely on causal features and external knowledge. However, these approaches fall short in two dimensions: (1) causal features between events in a text often lack explicit clues, and (2) external knowledge may introduce bias, while specific problems require tailored analyses. To address these issues, we propose SemDI - a simple and effective Semantic Dependency Inquiry Network for ECI. SemDI captures semantic dependencies within the context using a unified encoder. Then, it utilizes a Cloze Analyzer to generate a fill-in token based on comprehensive context understanding. Finally, this fill-in token is used to inquire about the causal relation between two events. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SemDI, surpassing state-of-the-art methods on three widely used benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/hrlics/SemDI.
Data Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation: A Survey
Authors: Yizhou Dang, Enneng Yang, YuTing Liu, Guibing Guo, Linying Jiang, Jianzhe Zhao, Xingwei Wang
Date: 2024-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Recommendation Systems, Sequential Recommendation, Survey

As an essential branch of recommender systems, sequential recommendation (SR) has received much attention due to its well-consistency with real-world situations. However, the widespread data sparsity issue limits the SR model's performance. Therefore, researchers have proposed many data augmentation (DA) methods to mitigate this phenomenon and have achieved impressive progress. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of DA methods for SR. We start by introducing the research background and motivation. Then, we categorize existing methodologies regarding their augmentation principles, objects, and purposes. Next, we present a comparative discussion of their advantages and disadvantages, followed by the exhibition and analysis of representative experimental results. Finally, we outline directions for future research and summarize this survey. We also maintain a repository with a paper list at \url{https://github.com/KingGugu/DA-CL-4Rec}.
A Multimodal Dense Retrieval Approach for Speech-Based Open-Domain Question Answering
Authors: Georgios Sidiropoulos, Evangelos Kanoulas
Date: 2024-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Open-Domain Question Answering, Passage Retrieval, Question Answering, Retrieval, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Speech-based open-domain question answering (QA over a large corpus of text passages with spoken questions) has emerged as an important task due to the increasing number of users interacting with QA systems via speech interfaces. Passage retrieval is a key task in speech-based open-domain QA. So far, previous works adopted pipelines consisting of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that transcribes the spoken question before feeding it to a dense text retriever. Such pipelines have several limitations. The need for an ASR model limits the applicability to low-resource languages and specialized domains with no annotated speech data. Furthermore, the ASR model propagates its errors to the retriever. In this work, we try to alleviate these limitations by proposing an ASR-free, end-to-end trained multimodal dense retriever that can work directly on spoken questions. Our experimental results showed that, on shorter questions, our retriever is a promising alternative to the \textit{ASR and Retriever} pipeline, achieving better retrieval performance in cases where ASR would have mistranscribed important words in the question or have produced a transcription with a high word error rate.
Procedure Model for Building Knowledge Graphs for Industry Applications
Authors: Sascha Meckler
Date: 2024-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: graph construction, Knowledge Graphs

Enterprise knowledge graphs combine business data and organizational knowledge by means of a semantic network of concepts, properties, individuals and relationships. The graph-based integration of previously unconnected information with domain knowledge provides new insights and enables intelligent business applications. However, knowledge graph construction is a large investment which requires a joint effort of domain and technical experts. This paper presents a practical step-by-step procedure model for building an RDF knowledge graph that interconnects heterogeneous data and expert knowledge for an industry use case. The self-contained process adapts the "Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining" and uses competency questions throughout the entire development cycle. The procedure model starts with business and data understanding, describes tasks for ontology modeling and the graph setup, and ends with process steps for evaluation and deployment.
More Clustering Quality Metrics for ABCDE
Authors: Stephan van Staden
Date: 2024-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

ABCDE is a technique for evaluating clusterings of very large populations of items. Given two clusterings, namely a Baseline clustering and an Experiment clustering, ABCDE can characterize their differences with impact and quality metrics, and thus help to determine which clustering to prefer. We previously described the basic quality metrics of ABCDE, namely the GoodSplitRate, BadSplitRate, GoodMergeRate, BadMergeRate and DeltaPrecision, and how to estimate them on the basis of human judgements. This paper extends that treatment with more quality metrics. It describes a technique that aims to characterize the DeltaRecall of the clustering change. It introduces a new metric, called IQ, to characterize the degree to which the clustering diff translates into an improvement in the quality. Ideally, a large diff would improve the quality by a large amount. Finally, this paper mentions ways to characterize the absolute Precision and Recall of a single clustering with ABCDE.
A Unified Causal Framework for Auditing Recommender Systems for Ethical Concerns
Authors: Vibhhu Sharma, Shantanu Gupta, Nil-Jana Akpinar, Zachary C. Lipton, Liu Leqi
Date: 2024-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

As recommender systems become widely deployed in different domains, they increasingly influence their users' beliefs and preferences. Auditing recommender systems is crucial as it not only ensures the continuous improvement of recommendation algorithms but also safeguards against potential issues like biases and ethical concerns. In this paper, we view recommender system auditing from a causal lens and provide a general recipe for defining auditing metrics. Under this general causal auditing framework, we categorize existing auditing metrics and identify gaps in them -- notably, the lack of metrics for auditing user agency while accounting for the multi-step dynamics of the recommendation process. We leverage our framework and propose two classes of such metrics:future- and past-reacheability and stability, that measure the ability of a user to influence their own and other users' recommendations, respectively. We provide both a gradient-based and a black-box approach for computing these metrics, allowing the auditor to compute them under different levels of access to the recommender system. In our experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy of methods for computing the proposed metrics and inspect the design of recommender systems through these proposed metrics.
RPAF: A Reinforcement Prediction-Allocation Framework for Cache Allocation in Large-Scale Recommender Systems
Authors: Shuo Su, Xiaoshuang Chen, Yao Wang, Yulin Wu, Ziqiang Zhang, Kaiqiao Zhan, Ben Wang, Kun Gai
Date: 2024-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Modern recommender systems are built upon computation-intensive infrastructure, and it is challenging to perform real-time computation for each request, especially in peak periods, due to the limited computational resources. Recommending by user-wise result caches is widely used when the system cannot afford a real-time recommendation. However, it is challenging to allocate real-time and cached recommendations to maximize the users' overall engagement. This paper shows two key challenges to cache allocation, i.e., the value-strategy dependency and the streaming allocation. Then, we propose a reinforcement prediction-allocation framework (RPAF) to address these issues. RPAF is a reinforcement-learning-based two-stage framework containing prediction and allocation stages. The prediction stage estimates the values of the cache choices considering the value-strategy dependency, and the allocation stage determines the cache choices for each individual request while satisfying the global budget constraint. We show that the challenge of training RPAF includes globality and the strictness of budget constraints, and a relaxed local allocator (RLA) is proposed to address this issue. Moreover, a PoolRank algorithm is used in the allocation stage to deal with the streaming allocation problem. Experiments show that RPAF significantly improves users' engagement under computational budget constraints.
MedCodER: A Generative AI Assistant for Medical Coding
Authors: Krishanu Das Baksi, Elijah Soba, John J. Higgins, Ravi Saini, Jaden Wood, Jane Cook, Jack Scott, Nirmala Pudota, Tim Weninger, Edward Bowen, Sanmitra Bhattacharya
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Re-Ranking

Medical coding is essential for standardizing clinical data and communication but is often time-consuming and prone to errors. Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods struggle with automating coding due to the large label space, lengthy text inputs, and the absence of supporting evidence annotations that justify code selection. Recent advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer promising solutions to these challenges. In this work, we introduce MedCodER, a Generative AI framework for automatic medical coding that leverages extraction, retrieval, and re-ranking techniques as core components. MedCodER achieves a micro-F1 score of 0.60 on International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code prediction, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we present a new dataset containing medical records annotated with disease diagnoses, ICD codes, and supporting evidence texts (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13308316). Ablation tests confirm that MedCodER's performance depends on the integration of each of its aforementioned components, as performance declines when these components are evaluated in isolation.
VERA: Validation and Enhancement for Retrieval Augmented systems
Authors: Nitin Aravind Birur, Tanay Baswa, Divyanshu Kumar, Jatan Loya, Sahil Agarwal, Prashanth Harshangi
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, RAG, Response Generation, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities but often produce inaccurate responses, as they rely solely on their embedded knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances LLMs by incorporating an external information retrieval system, supplying additional context along with the query to mitigate inaccuracies for a particular context. However, accuracy issues still remain, as the model may rely on irrelevant documents or extrapolate incorrectly from its training knowledge. To assess and improve the performance of both the retrieval system and the LLM in a RAG framework, we propose \textbf{VERA} (\textbf{V}alidation and \textbf{E}nhancement for \textbf{R}etrieval \textbf{A}ugmented systems), a system designed to: 1) Evaluate and enhance the retrieved context before response generation, and 2) Evaluate and refine the LLM-generated response to ensure precision and minimize errors. VERA employs an evaluator-cum-enhancer LLM that first checks if external retrieval is necessary, evaluates the relevance and redundancy of the retrieved context, and refines it to eliminate non-essential information. Post-response generation, VERA splits the response into atomic statements, assesses their relevance to the query, and ensures adherence to the context. Our experiments demonstrate VERA's remarkable efficacy not only in improving the performance of smaller open-source models, but also larger state-of-the art models. These enhancements underscore VERA's potential to produce accurate and relevant responses, advancing the state-of-the-art in retrieval-augmented language modeling. VERA's robust methodology, combining multiple evaluation and refinement steps, effectively mitigates hallucinations and improves retrieval and response processes, making it a valuable tool for applications demanding high accuracy and reliability in information generation. .
GLARE: Guided LexRank for Advanced Retrieval in Legal Analysis
Authors: Fabio Gregório, Rafaela Castro, Kele Belloze, Rui Pedro Lopes, Eduardo Bezerra
Date: 2024-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

The Brazilian Constitution, known as the Citizen's Charter, provides mechanisms for citizens to petition the Judiciary, including the so-called special appeal. This specific type of appeal aims to standardize the legal interpretation of Brazilian legislation in cases where the decision contradicts federal laws. The handling of special appeals is a daily task in the Judiciary, regularly presenting significant demands in its courts. We propose a new method called GLARE, based on unsupervised machine learning, to help the legal analyst classify a special appeal on a topic from a list made available by the National Court of Brazil (STJ). As part of this method, we propose a modification of the graph-based LexRank algorithm, which we call Guided LexRank. This algorithm generates the summary of a special appeal. The degree of similarity between the generated summary and different topics is evaluated using the BM25 algorithm. As a result, the method presents a ranking of themes most appropriate to the analyzed special appeal. The proposed method does not require prior labeling of the text to be evaluated and eliminates the need for large volumes of data to train a model. We evaluate the effectiveness of the method by applying it to a special appeal corpus previously classified by human experts.
Big data searching using words
Authors: Santanu Acharjee, Ripunjoy Choudhury
Date: 2024-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Topological Data Analysis

Big data analytics is one of the most promising areas of new research and development in computer science, enterprises, e-commerce, and defense. For many organizations, big data is regarded as one of their most important strategic assets. This explosive growth has made it necessary to develop effective techniques for examining and analyzing big data from a mathematical perspective. Among various methods of analyzing big data, topological data analysis (TDA) is now considered one of the useful tools. However, there is no fundamental concept related to topological structure in big data. In this paper, we introduce some fundamental ideas related to the neighborhood structure of words in data searching, which can be extended to form important topological structures of big data in the future. Additionally, we introduce big data primal in big data searching and discuss the application of neighborhood structures in detecting anomalies in data searching using the Jaccard similarity coefficient.
Advertiser Content Understanding via LLMs for Google Ads Safety
Authors: Joseph Wallace, Tushar Dogra, Wei Qiao, YuAn Wang
Date: 2024-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction

Ads Content Safety at Google requires classifying billions of ads for Google Ads content policies. Consistent and accurate policy enforcement is important for advertiser experience and user safety and it is a challenging problem, so there is a lot of value for improving it for advertisers and users. Inconsistent policy enforcement causes increased policy friction and poor experience with good advertisers, and bad advertisers exploit the inconsistency by creating multiple similar ads in the hope that some will get through our defenses. This study proposes a method to understand advertiser's intent for content policy violations, using Large Language Models (LLMs). We focus on identifying good advertisers to reduce content over-flagging and improve advertiser experience, though the approach can easily be extended to classify bad advertisers too. We generate advertiser's content profile based on multiple signals from their ads, domains, targeting info, etc. We then use LLMs to classify the advertiser content profile, along with relying on any knowledge the LLM has of the advertiser, their products or brand, to understand whether they are likely to violate a certain policy or not. After minimal prompt tuning our method was able to reach 95\% accuracy on a small test set.
Recall: Empowering Multimodal Embedding for Edge Devices
Authors: Dongqi Cai, Shangguang Wang, Chen Peng, Zeling Zhang, Mengwei Xu
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Human memory is inherently prone to forgetting. To address this, multimodal embedding models have been introduced, which transform diverse real-world data into a unified embedding space. These embeddings can be retrieved efficiently, aiding mobile users in recalling past information. However, as model complexity grows, so do its resource demands, leading to reduced throughput and heavy computational requirements that limit mobile device implementation. In this paper, we introduce RECALL, a novel on-device multimodal embedding system optimized for resource-limited mobile environments. RECALL achieves high-throughput, accurate retrieval by generating coarse-grained embeddings and leveraging query-based filtering for refined retrieval. Experimental results demonstrate that RECALL delivers high-quality embeddings with superior throughput, all while operating unobtrusively with minimal memory and energy consumption.
WISDOM: An AI-powered framework for emerging research detection using weak signal analysis and advanced topic modeling
Authors: Ashkan Ebadi, Alain Auger, Yvan Gauthier
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00

The landscape of science and technology is characterized by its dynamic and evolving nature, constantly reshaped by new discoveries, innovations, and paradigm shifts. Moreover, science is undergoing a remarkable shift towards increasing interdisciplinary collaboration, where the convergence of diverse fields fosters innovative solutions to complex problems. Detecting emerging scientific topics is paramount as it enables industries, policymakers, and innovators to adapt their strategies, investments, and regulations proactively. As the common approach for detecting emerging technologies, despite being useful, bibliometric analyses may suffer from oversimplification and/or misinterpretation of complex interdisciplinary trends. In addition, relying solely on domain experts to pinpoint emerging technologies from science and technology trends might restrict the ability to systematically analyze extensive information and introduce subjective judgments into the interpretations. To overcome these drawbacks, in this work, we present an automated artificial intelligence-enabled framework, called WISDOM, for detecting emerging research themes using advanced topic modeling and weak signal analysis. The proposed approach can assist strategic planners and domain experts in more effectively recognizing and tracking trends related to emerging topics by swiftly processing and analyzing vast volumes of data, uncovering hidden cross-disciplinary patterns, and offering unbiased insights, thereby enhancing the efficiency and objectivity of the detection process. As the case technology, we assess WISDOM's performance in identifying emerging research as well as their trends, in the field of underwater sensing technologies using scientific papers published between 2004 and 2021.