Neural networks of ads systems usually take input from multiple resources, e.g., query-ad relevance, ad features and user portraits. These inputs are encoded into one-hot or multi-hot binary features, with typically only a tiny fraction of nonzero feature values per example. Deep learning models in online advertising industries can have terabyte-scale parameters that do not fit in the GPU memory nor the CPU main memory on a computing node. For example, a sponsored online advertising system can contain more than $10^{11}$ sparse features, making the neural network a massive model with around 10 TB parameters. In this paper, we introduce a distributed GPU hierarchical parameter server for massive scale deep learning ads systems. We propose a hierarchical workflow that utilizes GPU High-Bandwidth Memory, CPU main memory and SSD as 3-layer hierarchical storage. All the neural network training computations are contained in GPUs. Extensive experiments on real-world data confirm the effectiveness and the scalability of the proposed system. A 4-node hierarchical GPU parameter server can train a model more than 2X faster than a 150-node in-memory distributed parameter server in an MPI cluster. In addition, the price-performance ratio of our proposed system is 4-9 times better than an MPI-cluster solution.

In this work, we investigate the application of deep learning methods for computed tomography in the context of having a low-data regime. As motivation, we review some of the existing approaches and obtain quantitative results after training them with different amounts of data. We find that the learned primal-dual has an outstanding performance in terms of reconstruction quality and data efficiency. However, in general, end-to-end learned methods have two issues: a) lack of classical guarantees in inverse problems and b) lack of generalization when not trained with enough data. To overcome these issues, we bring in the deep image prior approach in combination with classical regularization. The proposed methods improve the state-of-the-art results in the low data-regime.

Last summer, a 30-car freight train led by three diesel locomotives rumbled down the tracks for 48 miles through the Colorado desert -- with nobody at the controls. But this was no runaway train. In fact, the experiment could be a preview of the rail industry's future. The demonstration at the Transportation Technology Center -- a research and testing facility owned by the Association of American Railroads -- was the debut of driverless train software produced by one of the oldest companies in the industry. Along for the ride were representatives from some of America's largest freight railroads who in recent years have been intrigued by the many ways artificial intelligence (AI) could be applied to one of the nation's oldest industries.

We address the problem of personalizing query completion in a digital commerce setting, in which the bounce rate is typically high and recurring users are rare. We focus on in-session personalization and improve a standard noisy channel model by injecting dense vectors computed from product images at query time. We argue that image-based personalization displays several advantages over alternative proposals (from data availability to business scalability), and provide quantitative evidence and qualitative support on the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Finally, we show how a shared vector space between similar shops can be used to improve the experience of users browsing across sites, opening up the possibility of applying zero-shot unsupervised personalization to increase conversions. This will prove to be particularly relevant to retail groups that manage multiple brands and/or websites and to multi-tenant SaaS providers that serve multiple clients in the same space.

In the optimization of dynamic systems, the variables typically have constraints. Such problems can be modeled as a constrained Markov Decision Process (MDP). This paper considers a model-free approach to the problem, where the transition probabilities are not known. In the presence of peak constraints, the agent has to choose the policy to maximize the long-term average reward as well as satisfy the constraints at each time. We propose modifications to the standard Q-learning problem for unconstrained optimization to come up with an algorithm with peak constraints. The proposed algorithm is shown to achieve $O(T^{1/2+\gamma})$ regret bound for the obtained reward, and $O(T^{1-\gamma})$ regret bound for the constraint violation for any $\gamma \in(0,1/2)$ and time-horizon $T$. We note that these are the first results on regret analysis for constrained MDP, where the transition problems are not known apriori. We demonstrate the proposed algorithm on an energy harvesting problem where it outperforms state-of-the-art and performs close to the theoretical upper bound of the studied optimization problem.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are commonly labelled as black-boxes lacking interpretability; thus, hindering human's understanding of DNNs' behaviors. A need exists to generate a meaningful sequential logic for the production of a specific output. Decision trees exhibit better interpretability and expressive power due to their representation language and the existence of efficient algorithms to generate rules. Growing a decision tree based on the available data could produce larger than necessary trees or trees that do not generalise well. In this paper, we introduce two novel multivariate decision tree (MDT) algorithms for rule extraction from a DNN: an Exact-Convertible Decision Tree (EC-DT) and a Deep C-Net algorithm to transform a neural network with Rectified Linear Unit activation functions into a representative tree which can be used to extract multivariate rules for reasoning. While the EC-DT translates the DNN in a layer-wise manner to represent exactly the decision boundaries implicitly learned by the hidden layers of the network, the Deep C-Net inherits the decompositional approach from EC-DT and combines with a C5 tree learning algorithm to construct the decision rules. The results suggest that while EC-DT is superior in preserving the structure and the accuracy of DNN, C-Net generates the most compact and highly effective trees from DNN. Both proposed MDT algorithms generate rules including combinations of multiple attributes for precise interpretation of decision-making processes.

Online Cancer Support Groups (OCSG) are becoming an increasingly vital source of information, experiences and empowerment for patients with cancer. Despite significant contributions to physical, psychological and emotional wellbeing of patients, OCSG are yet to be formally recognised and used in multidisciplinary cancer support programs. This study highlights the opportunity of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in OCSG to address psychological morbidity, with supporting empirical evidence from prostate cancer (PCa) patients. A validated framework of AI techniques and Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods, was used to investigate PCa patient activities based on conversations in ten international OCSG (18,496 patients- 277,805 conversations). The specific focus was on activities that indicate psychological morbidity; the reasons for joining OCSG, deep emotions and the variation from joining through to milestones in the cancer trajectory.

Suppose you would like to know mortality rates for women during childbirth, by country, around the world. One option is the WomanStats Project, the website of an academic research effort investigating the links between the security and activities of nation-states, and the security of the women who live in them. The project, founded in 2001, meets a need by patching together data from around the world. Many countries are indifferent to collecting statistics about women's lives. But even where countries try harder to gather data, there are clear challenges to arriving at useful numbers -- whether it comes to women's physical security, property rights, and government participation, among many other issues.

Entity alignment seeks to find entities in different knowledge graphs (KGs) that refer to the same real-world object. Recent advancement in KG embedding impels the advent of embedding-based entity alignment, which encodes entities in a continuous embedding space and measures entity similarities based on the learned embeddings. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive experimental study of this emerging field. This study surveys 23 recent embedding-based entity alignment approaches and categorizes them based on their techniques and characteristics. We further observe that current approaches use different datasets in evaluation, and the degree distributions of entities in these datasets are inconsistent with real KGs. Hence, we propose a new KG sampling algorithm, with which we generate a set of dedicated benchmark datasets with various heterogeneity and distributions for a realistic evaluation. This study also produces an open-source library, which includes 12 representative embedding-based entity alignment approaches. We extensively evaluate these approaches on the generated datasets, to understand their strengths and limitations. Additionally, for several directions that have not been explored in current approaches, we perform exploratory experiments and report our preliminary findings for future studies. The benchmark datasets, open-source library and experimental results are all accessible online and will be duly maintained.

Ranking alternatives is a natural way for humans to explain their preferences. It is used in many settings, such as school choice, course allocations and residency matches. Without having any information on the underlying cardinal utilities, arguing about the fairness of allocations requires extending the ordinal item ranking to ordinal bundle ranking. The most commonly used such extension is stochastic dominance (SD), where a bundle X is preferred over a bundle Y if its score is better according to all additive score functions. SD is a very conservative extension, by which few allocations are necessarily fair while many allocations are possibly fair. We propose to make a natural assumption on the underlying cardinal utilities of the players, namely that the difference between two items at the top is larger than the difference between two items at the bottom. This assumption implies a preference extension which we call diminishing differences (DD), where X is preferred over Y if its score is better according to all additive score functions satisfying the DD assumption. We give a full characterization of allocations that are necessarily-proportional or possibly-proportional according to this assumption. Based on this characterization, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for finding a necessarily-DD-proportional allocation whenever it exists. Using simulations, we compare the various fairness criteria in terms of their probability of existence, and their probability of being fair by the underlying cardinal valuations. We find that necessary-DD-proportionality fares well in both measures. We also consider envy-freeness and Pareto optimality under diminishing-differences, as well as chore allocation under the analogous condition --- increasing-differences.