In this work, we present our journey to revolutionize the personalized recommendation engine through end-to-end learning from raw user actions. We encode user's long-term interest in Pinner- Former, a user embedding optimized for long-term future actions via a new dense all-action loss, and capture user's short-term intention by directly learning from the real-time action sequences. We conducted both offline and online experiments to validate the performance of the new model architecture, and also address the challenge of serving such a complex model using mixed CPU/GPU setup in production. The proposed system has been deployed in production at Pinterest and has delivered significant online gains across organic and Ads applications.

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a fundamental yet challenging task in the NLP community. Recent works of SRL mainly fall into two lines: 1) BIO-based; 2) span-based. Despite ubiquity, they share some intrinsic drawbacks of not considering internal argument structures, potentially hindering the model's expressiveness. The key challenge is arguments are flat structures, and there are no determined subtree realizations for words inside arguments. To remedy this, in this paper, we propose to regard flat argument spans as latent subtrees, accordingly reducing SRL to a tree parsing task. In particular, we equip our formulation with a novel span-constrained TreeCRF to make tree structures span-aware and further extend it to the second-order case. We conduct extensive experiments on CoNLL05 and CoNLL12 benchmarks. Results reveal that our methods perform favorably better than all previous syntax-agnostic works, achieving new state-of-the-art under both end-to-end and w/ gold predicates settings.

A prototype "smart bin" developed by researchers at Australia's University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) can sort recyclable materials automatically through a combination of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and machine vision. UTS' Xu Wang said the system can categorize different types of waste such as glass bottles, metal cans, and several varieties of plastic. "We have a camera and we're running an AI algorithm to classify different types of plastics and then we use IoT [Internet of Things] and other robotics technology to sort the waste into the bins," Wang explained. The researchers envision smart bins deployed in shopping centers, schools, cinemas, businesses, and airports.

We examine the inducement of rare but severe errors in English-Chinese and Chinese-English in-domain neural machine translation by minimal deletion of the source text with character-based models. By deleting a single character, we can induce severe translation errors. We categorize these errors and compare the results of deleting single characters and single words. We also examine the effect of training data size on the number and types of pathological cases induced by these minimal perturbations, finding significant variation. We find that deleting a word hurts overall translation score more than deleting a character, but certain errors are more likely to occur when deleting characters, with language direction also influencing the effect.

Smartwatches or fitness trackers have garnered a lot of popularity as potential health tracking devices due to their affordable and longitudinal monitoring capabilities. To further widen their health tracking capabilities, in recent years researchers have started to look into the possibility of Atrial Fibrillation (AF) detection in real-time leveraging photoplethysmography (PPG) data, an inexpensive sensor widely available in almost all smartwatches. A significant challenge in AF detection from PPG signals comes from the inherent noise in the smartwatch PPG signals. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning based approach, BayesBeat that leverages the power of Bayesian deep learning to accurately infer AF risks from noisy PPG signals, and at the same time provides an uncertainty estimate of the prediction. Extensive experiments on two publicly available dataset reveal that our proposed method BayesBeat outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, BayesBeat is substantially more efficient having 40-200X fewer parameters than state-of-the-art baseline approaches making it suitable for deployment in resource constrained wearable devices.

With the wide spread of sensors and smart devices in recent years, the data generation speed of the Internet of Things (IoT) systems has increased dramatically. In IoT systems, massive volumes of data must be processed, transformed, and analyzed on a frequent basis to enable various IoT services and functionalities. Machine Learning (ML) approaches have shown their capacity for IoT data analytics. However, applying ML models to IoT data analytics tasks still faces many difficulties and challenges, specifically, effective model selection, design/tuning, and updating, which have brought massive demand for experienced data scientists. Additionally, the dynamic nature of IoT data may introduce concept drift issues, causing model performance degradation. To reduce human efforts, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) has become a popular field that aims to automatically select, construct, tune, and update machine learning models to achieve the best performance on specified tasks. In this paper, we conduct a review of existing methods in the model selection, tuning, and updating procedures in the area of AutoML in order to identify and summarize the optimal solutions for every step of applying ML algorithms to IoT data analytics. To justify our findings and help industrial users and researchers better implement AutoML approaches, a case study of applying AutoML to IoT anomaly detection problems is conducted in this work. Lastly, we discuss and classify the challenges and research directions for this domain.

Using style-transfer models to reduce offensiveness of social media comments can help foster a more inclusive environment. However, there are no sizable datasets that contain offensive texts and their inoffensive counterparts, and fine-tuning pretrained models with limited labeled data can lead to the loss of original meaning in the style-transferred text. To address this issue, we provide two major contributions. First, we release the first publicly-available, parallel corpus of offensive Reddit comments and their style-transferred counterparts annotated by expert sociolinguists. Then, we introduce the first discourse-aware style-transfer models that can effectively reduce offensiveness in Reddit text while preserving the meaning of the original text. These models are the first to examine inferential links between the comment and the text it is replying to when transferring the style of offensive Reddit text. We propose two different methods of integrating discourse relations with pretrained transformer models and evaluate them on our dataset of offensive comments from Reddit and their inoffensive counterparts. Improvements over the baseline with respect to both automatic metrics and human evaluation indicate that our discourse-aware models are better at preserving meaning in style-transferred text when compared to the state-of-the-art discourse-agnostic models.

Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) has been recently extended to multiple knowledge graph (KG) structures, initiating new research directions, e.g. static KGC, temporal KGC and few-shot KGC. Previous works often design KGC models closely coupled with specific graph structures, which inevitably results in two drawbacks: 1) structure-specific KGC models are mutually incompatible; 2) existing KGC methods are not adaptable to emerging KGs. In this paper, we propose KG-S2S, a Seq2Seq generative framework that could tackle different verbalizable graph structures by unifying the representation of KG facts into "flat" text, regardless of their original form. To remedy the KG structure information loss from the "flat" text, we further improve the input representations of entities and relations, and the inference algorithm in KG-S2S. Experiments on five benchmarks show that KG-S2S outperforms many competitive baselines, setting new state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we analyze KG-S2S's ability on the different relations and the Non-entity Generations.

However, in many real applications, the assumption cannot be satisfied due to the existence of unknowns. A reliable classification model ought to own the ability to say "I do not know" to out-of-distribution (OOD) data that the model has not seen before, which is the key to deploying models safely in the real world [34, 45]. For example, a wildlife monitoring system with the ability to detect OOD data will not confidently regard unknown animal categories as known categories, which is essential to help humans discover new species [35]. In medical image recognition [12, 41], models with the ability to detect OOD data can help doctors discover rare and novel diseases and prevent patients missing the best treatment period. In autonomous driving, OOD detection enables cars to evoke human control of driving in an emergency or unknown scenarios [17, 36], which contributes to safer and more reliable autonomous driving. OOD detection has received much attention because of its significance, and plenty of methods have emerged. The existing OOD detection methods can be divided into two main categories: classification-based OOD detection methods and density-based OOD detection methods. The classification-based methods contain post-hoc based methods [18, 27] and fine-tuning based methods [19, 30].

The possible consequences for the same context may vary depending on the situation we refer to. However, current studies in natural language processing do not focus on situated commonsense reasoning under multiple possible scenarios. This study frames this task by asking multiple questions with the same set of possible endings as candidate answers, given a short story text. Our resulting dataset, Possible Stories, consists of more than 4.5K questions over 1.3K story texts in English. We discover that even current strong pretrained language models struggle to answer the questions consistently, highlighting that the highest accuracy in an unsupervised setting (60.2%) is far behind human accuracy (92.5%). Through a comparison with existing datasets, we observe that the questions in our dataset contain minimal annotation artifacts in the answer options. In addition, our dataset includes examples that require counterfactual reasoning, as well as those requiring readers' reactions and fictional information, suggesting that our dataset can serve as a challenging testbed for future studies on situated commonsense reasoning.