Counterfactual explanations interpret the recommendation mechanism via exploring how minimal alterations on items or users affect the recommendation decisions. Existing counterfactual explainable approaches face huge search space and their explanations are either action-based (e.g., user click) or aspect-based (i.e., item description). We believe item attribute-based explanations are more intuitive and persuadable for users since they explain by fine-grained item demographic features (e.g., brand). Moreover, counterfactual explanation could enhance recommendations by filtering out negative items. In this work, we propose a novel Counterfactual Explainable Recommendation (CERec) to generate item attribute-based counterfactual explanations meanwhile to boost recommendation performance. Our CERec optimizes an explanation policy upon uniformly searching candidate counterfactuals within a reinforcement learning environment. We reduce the huge search space with an adaptive path sampler by using rich context information of a given knowledge graph. We also deploy the explanation policy to a recommendation model to enhance the recommendation. Extensive explainability and recommendation evaluations demonstrate CERec's ability to provide explanations consistent with user preferences and maintain improved recommendations. We release our code at https://github.com/Chrystalii/CERec.

The content that a recommender system (RS) shows to users influences them. Therefore, when choosing a recommender to deploy, one is implicitly also choosing to induce specific internal states in users. Even more, systems trained via long-horizon optimization will have direct incentives to manipulate users: in this work, we focus on the incentive to shift user preferences so they are easier to satisfy. We argue that - before deployment - system designers should: estimate the shifts a recommender would induce; evaluate whether such shifts would be undesirable; and perhaps even actively optimize to avoid problematic shifts. These steps involve two challenging ingredients: estimation requires anticipating how hypothetical algorithms would influence user preferences if deployed - we do this by using historical user interaction data to train a predictive user model which implicitly contains their preference dynamics; evaluation and optimization additionally require metrics to assess whether such influences are manipulative or otherwise unwanted - we use the notion of "safe shifts", that define a trust region within which behavior is safe: for instance, the natural way in which users would shift without interference from the system could be deemed "safe". In simulated experiments, we show that our learned preference dynamics model is effective in estimating user preferences and how they would respond to new recommenders. Additionally, we show that recommenders that optimize for staying in the trust region can avoid manipulative behaviors while still generating engagement.

Recommender systems play a key role in shaping modern web ecosystems. These systems alternate between (1) making recommendations (2) collecting user responses to these recommendations, and (3) retraining the recommendation algorithm based on this feedback. During this process the recommender system influences the user behavioral data that is subsequently used to update it, thus creating a feedback loop. Recent work has shown that feedback loops may compromise recommendation quality and homogenize user behavior, raising ethical and performance concerns when deploying recommender systems. To address these issues, we propose the Causal Adjustment for Feedback Loops (CAFL), an algorithm that provably breaks feedback loops using causal inference and can be applied to any recommendation algorithm that optimizes a training loss. Our main observation is that a recommender system does not suffer from feedback loops if it reasons about causal quantities, namely the intervention distributions of recommendations on user ratings. Moreover, we can calculate this intervention distribution from observational data by adjusting for the recommender system's predictions of user preferences. Using simulated environments, we demonstrate that CAFL improves recommendation quality when compared to prior correction methods.

This study discusses the effect of semi-supervised learning in combination with pretrained language models for data-to-text generation. It is not known whether semi-supervised learning is still helpful when a large-scale language model is also supplemented. This study aims to answer this question by comparing a data-to-text system only supplemented with a language model, to two data-to-text systems that are additionally enriched by a data augmentation or a pseudo-labeling semi-supervised learning approach. Results show that semi-supervised learning results in higher scores on diversity metrics. In terms of output quality, extending the training set of a data-to-text system with a language model using the pseudo-labeling approach did increase text quality scores, but the data augmentation approach yielded similar scores to the system without training set extension. These results indicate that semi-supervised learning approaches can bolster output quality and diversity, even when a language model is also present.

Few-shot sound event detection is the task of detecting sound events, despite having only a few labelled examples of the class of interest. This framework is particularly useful in bioacoustics, where often there is a need to annotate very long recordings but the expert annotator time is limited. This paper presents an overview of the second edition of the few-shot bioacoustic sound event detection task included in the DCASE 2022 challenge. A detailed description of the task objectives, dataset, and baselines is presented, together with the main results obtained and characteristics of the submitted systems. This task received submissions from 15 different teams from which 13 scored higher than the baselines. The highest F-score was of 60% on the evaluation set, which leads to a huge improvement over last year's edition. Highly-performing methods made use of prototypical networks, transductive learning, and addressed the variable length of events from all target classes. Furthermore, by analysing results on each of the subsets we can identify the main difficulties that the systems face, and conclude that few-show bioacoustic sound event detection remains an open challenge.

Music is a mysterious language that conveys feeling and thoughts via different tones and timbre. For better understanding of timbre in music, we chose music data of 6 representative instruments, analysed their timbre features and classified them. Instead of the current trend of Neural Network for black-box classification, our project is based on a combination of MFCC and LPC, and augmented with a 6-dimensional feature vector designed by ourselves from observation and attempts. In our white-box model, we observed significant patterns of sound that distinguish different timbres, and discovered some connection between objective data and subjective senses. With a totally 32-dimensional feature vector and a naive all-pairs SVM, we achieved improved classification accuracy compared to a single tool. We also attempted to analyze music pieces downloaded from the Internet, found out different performance on different instruments, explored the reasons and suggested possible ways to improve the performance.

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SAN MATEO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jul 13, 2022–. Veryfi, using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to transform documents into structured …

Just as advances in automobile technology have made driving safer, incorporating AI into decision-making reduces financial risks.

BUSINESS WIRE)–Veryfi, using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to transform documents into structured data in just seconds, has announced …