pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Modeling Sustainable City Trips: Integrating CO2e Emissions, Popularity, and Seasonality into Tourism Recommender Systems
Authors: Ashmi Banerjee, Tunar Mahmudov, Emil Adler, Fitri Nur Aisyah, Wolfgang Wörndl
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness, Recommendation Systems

Tourism affects not only the tourism industry but also society and stakeholders such as the environment, local businesses, and residents. Tourism Recommender Systems (TRS) can be pivotal in promoting sustainable tourism by guiding travelers toward destinations with minimal negative impact. Our paper introduces a composite sustainability indicator for a city trip TRS based on the users' starting point and month of travel. This indicator integrates CO2e emissions for different transportation modes and analyses destination popularity and seasonal demand. We quantify city popularity based on user reviews, points of interest, and search trends from Tripadvisor and Google Trends data. To calculate a seasonal demand index, we leverage data from TourMIS and Airbnb. We conducted a user study to explore the fundamental trade-offs in travel decision-making and determine the weights for our proposed indicator. Finally, we demonstrate the integration of this indicator into a TRS, illustrating its ability to deliver sustainable city trip recommendations. This work lays the foundation for future research by integrating sustainability measures and contributing to responsible recommendations by TRS.
Content-Based Collaborative Generation for Recommender Systems
Authors: Yidan Wang, Zhaochun Ren, Weiwei Sun, Jiyuan Yang, Zhixiang Liang, Xin Chen, Ruobing Xie, Su Yan, Xu Zhang, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Xin Xin
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Recommendation Systems, Text Generation

Generative models have emerged as a promising utility to enhance recommender systems. It is essential to model both item content and user-item collaborative interactions in a unified generative framework for better recommendation. Although some existing large language model (LLM)-based methods contribute to fusing content information and collaborative signals, they fundamentally rely on textual language generation, which is not fully aligned with the recommendation task. How to integrate content knowledge and collaborative interaction signals in a generative framework tailored for item recommendation is still an open research challenge. In this paper, we propose content-based collaborative generation for recommender systems, namely ColaRec. ColaRec is a sequence-to-sequence framework which is tailored for directly generating the recommended item identifier. Precisely, the input sequence comprises data pertaining to the user's interacted items, and the output sequence represents the generative identifier (GID) for the suggested item. To model collaborative signals, the GIDs are constructed from a pretrained collaborative filtering model, and the user is represented as the content aggregation of interacted items. To this end, ColaRec captures both collaborative signals and content information in a unified framework. Then an item indexing task is proposed to conduct the alignment between the content-based semantic space and the interaction-based collaborative space. Besides, a contrastive loss is further introduced to ensure that items with similar collaborative GIDs have similar content representations. To verify the effectiveness of ColaRec, we conduct experiments on four benchmark datasets. Empirical results demonstrate the superior performance of ColaRec.
Decoy Effect In Search Interaction: Understanding User Behavior and Measuring System Vulnerability
Authors: Nuo Chen, Jiqun Liu, Hanpei Fang, Yuankai Luo, Tetsuya Sakai, Xiao-Ming Wu
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

This study examines the decoy effect's underexplored influence on user search interactions and methods for measuring information retrieval (IR) systems' vulnerability to this effect. It explores how decoy results alter users' interactions on search engine result pages, focusing on metrics like click-through likelihood, browsing time, and perceived document usefulness. By analyzing user interaction logs from multiple datasets, the study demonstrates that decoy results significantly affect users' behavior and perceptions. Furthermore, it investigates how different levels of task difficulty and user knowledge modify the decoy effect's impact, finding that easier tasks and lower knowledge levels lead to higher engagement with target documents. In terms of IR system evaluation, the study introduces the DEJA-VU metric to assess systems' susceptibility to the decoy effect, testing it on specific retrieval tasks. The results show differences in systems' effectiveness and vulnerability, contributing to our understanding of cognitive biases in search behavior and suggesting pathways for creating more balanced and bias-aware IR evaluations.
Sequential Recommendation with Latent Relations based on Large Language Model
Authors: Shenghao Yang, Weizhi Ma, Peijie Sun, Qingyao Ai, Yiqun Liu, Mingchen Cai, Min Zhang
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Recommendation Systems, Relation, Sequential Recommendation, World Knowledge

Sequential recommender systems predict items that may interest users by modeling their preferences based on historical interactions. Traditional sequential recommendation methods rely on capturing implicit collaborative filtering signals among items. Recent relation-aware sequential recommendation models have achieved promising performance by explicitly incorporating item relations into the modeling of user historical sequences, where most relations are extracted from knowledge graphs. However, existing methods rely on manually predefined relations and suffer the sparsity issue, limiting the generalization ability in diverse scenarios with varied item relations. In this paper, we propose a novel relation-aware sequential recommendation framework with Latent Relation Discovery (LRD). Different from previous relation-aware models that rely on predefined rules, we propose to leverage the Large Language Model (LLM) to provide new types of relations and connections between items. The motivation is that LLM contains abundant world knowledge, which can be adopted to mine latent relations of items for recommendation. Specifically, inspired by that humans can describe relations between items using natural language, LRD harnesses the LLM that has demonstrated human-like knowledge to obtain language knowledge representations of items. These representations are fed into a latent relation discovery module based on the discrete state variational autoencoder (DVAE). Then the self-supervised relation discovery tasks and recommendation tasks are jointly optimized. Experimental results on multiple public datasets demonstrate our proposed latent relations discovery method can be incorporated with existing relation-aware sequential recommendation models and significantly improve the performance. Further analysis experiments indicate the effectiveness and reliability of the discovered latent relations.
Common Sense Enhanced Knowledge-based Recommendation with Large Language Model
Authors: Shenghao Yang, Weizhi Ma, Peijie Sun, Min Zhang, Qingyao Ai, Yiqun Liu, Mingchen Cai
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, World Knowledge

Knowledge-based recommendation models effectively alleviate the data sparsity issue leveraging the side information in the knowledge graph, and have achieved considerable performance. Nevertheless, the knowledge graphs used in previous work, namely metadata-based knowledge graphs, are usually constructed based on the attributes of items and co-occurring relations (e.g., also buy), in which the former provides limited information and the latter relies on sufficient interaction data and still suffers from cold start issue. Common sense, as a form of knowledge with generality and universality, can be used as a supplement to the metadata-based knowledge graph and provides a new perspective for modeling users' preferences. Recently, benefiting from the emergent world knowledge of the large language model, efficient acquisition of common sense has become possible. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-based recommendation framework incorporating common sense, CSRec, which can be flexibly coupled to existing knowledge-based methods. Considering the challenge of the knowledge gap between the common sense-based knowledge graph and metadata-based knowledge graph, we propose a knowledge fusion approach based on mutual information maximization theory. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the performance of existing knowledge-based recommendation models.
A Situation-aware Enhancer for Personalized Recommendation
Authors: Jiayu Li, Peijie Sun, Chumeng Jiang, Weizhi Ma, Qingyao Ai, Min Zhang
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

When users interact with Recommender Systems (RecSys), current situations, such as time, location, and environment, significantly influence their preferences. Situations serve as the background for interactions, where relationships between users and items evolve with situation changes. However, existing RecSys treat situations, users, and items on the same level. They can only model the relations between situations and users/items respectively, rather than the dynamic impact of situations on user-item associations (i.e., user preferences). In this paper, we provide a new perspective that takes situations as the preconditions for users' interactions. This perspective allows us to separate situations from user/item representations, and capture situations' influences over the user-item relationship, offering a more comprehensive understanding of situations. Based on it, we propose a novel Situation-Aware Recommender Enhancer (SARE), a pluggable module to integrate situations into various existing RecSys. Since users' perception of situations and situations' impact on preferences are both personalized, SARE includes a Personalized Situation Fusion (PSF) and a User-Conditioned Preference Encoder (UCPE) to model the perception and impact of situations, respectively. We conduct experiments of applying SARE on seven backbones in various settings on two real-world datasets. Experimental results indicate that SARE improves the recommendation performances significantly compared with backbones and SOTA situation-aware baselines.
Improving Out-of-Vocabulary Handling in Recommendation Systems
Authors: William Shiao, Mingxuan Ju, Zhichun Guo, Xin Chen, Evangelos Papalexakis, Tong Zhao, Neil Shah, Yozen Liu
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems (RS) are an increasingly relevant area for both academic and industry researchers, given their widespread impact on the daily online experiences of billions of users. One common issue in real RS is the cold-start problem, where users and items may not contain enough information to produce high-quality recommendations. This work focuses on a complementary problem: recommending new users and items unseen (out-of-vocabulary, or OOV) at training time. This setting is known as the inductive setting and is especially problematic for factorization-based models, which rely on encoding only those users/items seen at training time with fixed parameter vectors. Many existing solutions applied in practice are often naive, such as assigning OOV users/items to random buckets. In this work, we tackle this problem and propose approaches that better leverage available user/item features to improve OOV handling at the embedding table level. We discuss general-purpose plug-and-play approaches that are easily applicable to most RS models and improve inductive performance without negatively impacting transductive model performance. We extensively evaluate 9 OOV embedding methods on 5 models across 4 datasets (spanning different domains). One of these datasets is a proprietary production dataset from a prominent RS employed by a large social platform serving hundreds of millions of daily active users. In our experiments, we find that several proposed methods that exploit feature similarity using LSH consistently outperform alternatives on most model-dataset combinations, with the best method showing a mean improvement of 3.74% over the industry standard baseline in inductive performance. We release our code and hope our work helps practitioners make more informed decisions when handling OOV for their RS and further inspires academic research into improving OOV support in RS.
One Backpropagation in Two Tower Recommendation Models
Authors: Erjia Chen, Bang Wang
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00

Recent years have witnessed extensive researches on developing two tower recommendation models for relieving information overload. Four building modules can be identified in such models, namely, user-item encoding, negative sampling, loss computing and back-propagation updating. To the best of our knowledge, existing algorithms have researched only on the first three modules, yet neglecting the backpropagation module. They all adopt a kind of two backpropagation strategy, which are based on an implicit assumption of equally treating users and items in the training phase. In this paper, we challenge such an equal training assumption and propose a novel one backpropagation updating strategy, which keeps the normal gradient backpropagation for the item encoding tower, but cuts off the backpropagation for the user encoding tower. Instead, we propose a moving-aggregation updating strategy to update a user encoding in each training epoch. Except the proposed backpropagation updating module, we implement the other three modules with the most straightforward choices. Experiments on four public datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our model in terms of improved recommendation performance and reduced computation overload over the state-of-the-art competitors.
LLMs in HCI Data Work: Bridging the Gap Between Information Retrieval and Responsible Research Practices
Authors: Neda Taghizadeh Serajeh, Iman Mohammadi, Vittorio Fuccella, Mattia De Rosa
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Efficient and accurate information extraction from scientific papers is significant in the rapidly developing human-computer interaction research in the literature review process. Our paper introduces and analyses a new information retrieval system using state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) in combination with structured text analysis techniques to extract experimental data from HCI literature, emphasizing key elements. Then We analyze the challenges and risks of using LLMs in the world of research. We performed a comprehensive analysis on our conducted dataset, which contained the specified information of 300 CHI 2020-2022 papers, to evaluate the performance of the two large language models, GPT-3.5 (text-davinci-003) and Llama-2-70b, paired with structured text analysis techniques. The GPT-3.5 model gains an accuracy of 58\% and a mean absolute error of 7.00. In contrast, the Llama2 model indicates an accuracy of 56\% with a mean absolute error of 7.63. The ability to answer questions was also included in the system in order to work with streamlined data. By evaluating the risks and opportunities presented by LLMs, our work contributes to the ongoing dialogue on establishing methodological validity and ethical guidelines for LLM use in HCI data work.
Omni-Kernel Network for Image Restoration
Authors: Yuning Cui, Wenqi Ren, Alois Knoll
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2024 3
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Defocus Deblurring, Image Dehazing, Image Restoration, Representation Learning

Image restoration aims to reconstruct a high-quality image from a degraded low-quality observation. Recently, Transformer models have achieved promising performance on image restoration tasks due to their powerful ability to model long-range dependencies. However, the quadratically growing complexity with respect to the input size makes them inapplicable to practical applications. In this paper, we develop an efficient convolutional network for image restoration by enhancing multi-scale representation learning. To this end, we propose an omni-kernel module that consists of three branches, i.e., global, large, and local branches, to learn global-to-local feature representations efficiently. Specifically, the global branch achieves a global perceptive field via the dual-domain channel attention and frequency-gated mechanism. Furthermore, to provide multi-grained receptive fields, the large branch is formulated via different shapes of depth-wise convolutions with unusually large kernel sizes. Moreover, we complement local information using a point-wise depth-wise convolution. Finally, the proposed network, dubbed OKNet, is established by inserting the omni-kernel module into the bottleneck position for efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our network achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 benchmark datasets for three representative image restoration tasks, including image dehazing, image desnowing, and image defocus deblurring. The code is available at https://github.com/c-yn/OKNet.
Designing Expert Systems for Diagnosing the Diseases Using the Rule-Based and Neural Networks Methods
Authors: Majid Pakdel
Date: 2022-07-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: journal 2022 7

Currently, the four most common illnesses are allergies, Covid-19, the flu, and the upper respiratory infection (URI), which have more or less similar symptoms. These symptoms can be mild or very severe because the patient feels almost the same symptoms. The proposed expert systems are designed to help sufferers with early analysis of the diseases, perform preventive and therapeutic measures and, if necessary, consult a specialist. Considering the limitations of the expert system with the rule-based method that many rules should be written to diagnose the type of disease with different symptoms, to diagnose the type of disease with different symptoms the machine learning techniques are used and the type of disease (most likely to have common symptoms) are predicted using the neural networks. The language used in programming the proposed systems is Python.
A Large-Scale Network Construction and Lightweighting Method for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jiawei Han; Kaiqi Liu; Wei Li; Guangzhi Chen; Wenguang Wang; Feng Zhang
Date: 2024-03-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 2024 3
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

To significantly enhance the performance of point cloud semantic segmentation, this manuscript presents a novel method for constructing large-scale networks and offers an effective lightweighting technique. First, a latent point feature processing (LPFP) module is utilized to interconnect base networks such as PointNet++ and Point Transformer. This intermediate module serves both as a feature information transfer and a ground truth supervision function. Furthermore, in order to alleviate the increase in computational costs brought by constructing large-scale networks and better adapt to the demand for terminal deployment, a novel point cloud lightweighting method for semantic segmentation network (PCLN) is proposed to compress the network by transferring multidimensional feature information of large-scale networks. Specifically, at different stages of the large-scale network, the structure and attention information of the point features are selectively transferred to guide the compressed network to train in the direction of the large-scale network. This paper also solves the problem of representing global structure information of large-scale point clouds through feature sampling and aggregation. Extensive experiments on public datasets and real-world data demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of different base networks and outperform the state-of-the-art.
Bootstrapping Guarantees: Stability and Performance Analysis for Dynamic Encrypted Control
Authors: Sebastian Schlor, Frank Allgöwer
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00

Encrypted dynamic controllers that operate for an unlimited time have been a challenging subject of research. The fundamental difficulty is the accumulation of errors and scaling factors in the internal state during operation. Bootstrapping, a technique commonly employed in fully homomorphic cryptosystems, can be used to avoid overflows in the controller state but can potentially introduce significant numerical errors. In this paper, we analyze dynamic encrypted control with explicit consideration of bootstrapping. By recognizing the bootstrapping errors occurring in the controller's state as an uncertainty in the robust control framework, we can provide stability and performance guarantees for the whole encrypted control system. Further, the conservatism of the stability and performance test is reduced by using a lifted version of the control system.
Privacy-Preserving Distributed Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
Authors: Ehsan Lari, Reza Arablouei, Stefan Werner
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is an effective data representation tool with numerous applications in signal processing and machine learning. However, deploying NMF in a decentralized manner over ad-hoc networks introduces privacy concerns due to the conventional approach of sharing raw data among network agents. To address this, we propose a privacy-preserving algorithm for fully-distributed NMF that decomposes a distributed large data matrix into left and right matrix factors while safeguarding each agent's local data privacy. It facilitates collaborative estimation of the left matrix factor among agents and enables them to estimate their respective right factors without exposing raw data. To ensure data privacy, we secure information exchanges between neighboring agents utilizing the Paillier cryptosystem, a probabilistic asymmetric algorithm for public-key cryptography that allows computations on encrypted data without decryption. Simulation results conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in achieving privacy-preserving distributed NMF over ad-hoc networks.
Is The Watermarking Of LLM-Generated Code Robust?
Authors: Tarun Suresh, Shubham Ugare, Gagandeep Singh, Sasa Misailovic
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC

We present the first in depth study on the robustness of existing watermarking techniques applied to code generated by large language models (LLMs). As LLMs increasingly contribute to software development, watermarking has emerged as a potential solution for detecting AI generated code and mitigating misuse, such as plagiarism or the automated generation of malicious programs. While previous research has demonstrated the resilience of watermarking in the text setting, our work reveals that watermarking techniques are significantly more fragile in code-based contexts. Specifically, we show that simple semantic-preserving transformations, such as variable renaming and dead code insertion, can effectively erase watermarks without altering the program's functionality. To systematically evaluate watermark robustness, we develop an algorithm that traverses the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of a watermarked program and applies a sequence of randomized, semantics-preserving transformations. Our experimental results, conducted on Python code generated by different LLMs, indicate that even minor modifications can drastically reduce watermark detectability, with true positive rates (TPR) dropping below 50% in many cases. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/uiuc-arc/llm-code-watermark.