Online A/B testing, the gold standard for evaluating new advertising policies, consumes substantial engineering resources and risks significant revenue loss from deploying underperforming variations. This motivates the use of Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) for rapid, offline assessment. However, applying OPE to ad auctions is fundamentally more challenging than in domains like recommender systems, where stochastic policies are common. In online ad auctions, it is common for the highest-bidding ad to win the impression, resulting in a deterministic, winner-takes-all setting. This results in zero probability of exposure for non-winning ads, rendering standard OPE estimators inapplicable. We introduce the first principled framework for OPE in deterministic auctions by repurposing the bid landscape model to approximate the propensity score. This model allows us to derive robust approximate propensity scores, enabling the use of stable estimators like Self-Normalized Inverse Propensity Scoring (SNIPS) for counterfactual evaluation. We validate our approach on the AuctionNet simulation benchmark and against 2-weeks online A/B test from a large-scale industrial platform. Our method shows remarkable alignment with online results, achieving a 92\% Mean Directional Accuracy (MDA) in CTR prediction, significantly outperforming the parametric baseline. MDA is the most critical metric for guiding deployment decisions, as it reflects the ability to correctly predict whether a new model will improve or harm performance. This work contributes the first practical and validated framework for reliable OPE in deterministic auction environments, offering an efficient alternative to costly and risky online experiments.

Nowadays, recommendation systems have become crucial to online platforms, shaping user exposure by accurate preference modeling. However, such an exposure strategy can also reinforce users' existing preferences, leading to a notorious phenomenon named filter bubbles. Given its negative effects, such as group polarization, increasing attention has been paid to exploring reasonable measures to filter bubbles. However, most existing evaluation metrics simply measure the diversity of user exposure, failing to distinguish between algorithmic preference modeling and actual information confinement. In view of this, we introduce Bubble Escape Potential (BEP), a behavior-aware measure that quantifies how easily users can escape from filter bubbles. Specifically, BEP leverages a contrastive simulation framework that assigns different behavioral tendencies (e.g., positive vs. negative) to synthetic users and compares the induced exposure patterns. This design enables decoupling the effect of filter bubbles and preference modeling, allowing for more precise diagnosis of bubble severity. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple recommendation models to examine the relationship between predictive accuracy and bubble escape potential across different groups. To the best of our knowledge, our empirical results are the first to quantitatively validate the dilemma between preference modeling and filter bubbles. What's more, we observe a counter-intuitive phenomenon that mild random recommendations are ineffective in alleviating filter bubbles, which can offer a principled foundation for further work in this direction.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The Google Home app won't let you "Call Home" anymore Google appears to have nixed a feature that allowed users to "call home" to their Google smart speakers and displays from their smartphones. They say you can't go home again, and for the moment, it appears you can't call home to your Google displays or speakers anymore either. Google Home users on Reddit have been noticing that the "Call Home" button in the Google Home app, which lets you directly call your Google Nest Hub smart displays or Nest speakers from a smartphone, seems to have vanished . I don't see the Call Home button on the Google Home app either, and the sleuths at 9to5Google confirm that after "digging through the Home app, 'Call Home' has completely disappeared."

How a bizarre VHS tape from 1987 led the way for modern dating apps. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed. Please enter a valid phone number.

Building on this, we will examine joint text-speech pre-training (Chiu et al., 2022; Bar-rault et al., 2023; Chen et al., 2022) methods, This section will provide a comprehensive look at how state-of-the-art voice-interfaced LLMs (Reid et al., 2024; Chu et al., Current Trends The current work in AI virtual assistants builds upon the voice-only systems of the last decade by leveraging LLMs to significantly improve the coverage and robustness of the spoken language understanding and dialogue state tracking components, in addition to substantial advancements in spoken language generation. It highlights recent advancements in multi-turn dialogue systems, encompassing both LLM-based open-domain dialogue (ODD) and task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, as well as relevant datasets and evaluation metrics.

Apple thanked John Giannandrea for his efforts. Apple thanked John Giannandrea for his efforts. Siri-us setback: Apple's AI chief steps down as company lags behind rivals Apple's head of artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, is stepping down from the company. The move comes as the Silicon Valley giant has lagged behind its competitors in rolling out generative AI features, in particular its voice assistant Siri. Apple made the announcement on Monday, thanking Giannandrea for his seven-year tenure at the company.

We study streaming data with categorical features where the vocabulary of categorical feature values is changing and can even grow unboundedly over time. Feature hashing is commonly used as a pre-processing step to map these categorical values into a feature space of fixed size before learning their embeddings. While these methods have been developed and evaluated for offline or batch settings, in this paper we consider online settings. We show that deterministic embeddings are sensitive to the arrival order of categories and suffer from forgetting in online learning, leading to performance deterioration. To mitigate this issue, we propose a probabilistic hash embedding (PHE) model that treats hash embeddings as stochastic and applies Bayesian online learning to learn incrementally from data. Based on the structure of PHE, we derive a scalable inference algorithm to learn model parameters and infer/update the posteriors of hash embeddings and other latent variables. Our algorithm (i) can handle an evolving vocabulary of categorical items, (ii) is adaptive to new items without forgetting old items, (iii) is implementable with a bounded set of parameters that does not grow with the number of distinct observed values on the stream, and (iv) is invariant to the item arrival order. Experiments in classification, sequence modeling, and recommendation systems in online learning setups demonstrate the superior performance of PHE while maintaining high memory efficiency (consumes as low as 2~4 memory of a one-hot embedding table). Supplementary materials are at https://github.com/aodongli/probabilistic-hash-embeddings

Modern recommender systems struggle to effectively utilize the rich, yet high-dimensional and noisy, multi-modal features generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). Treating these features as static inputs decouples them from the core recommendation task. We address this limitation with a novel framework built on a key insight: deeply fusing multi-modal and collaborative knowledge for representation denoising. Our unified architecture introduces two primary technical innovations. First, we integrate dimensionality reduction directly into the recommendation model, enabling end-to-end co-training that makes the reduction process aware of the final ranking objective. Second, we introduce a contrastive learning objective that explicitly incorporates the collaborative filtering signal into the latent space. This synergistic process refines raw LLM embeddings, filtering noise while amplifying task-relevant signals. Extensive experiments confirm our method's superior discriminative power, proving that this integrated fusion and denoising strategy is critical for achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our work provides a foundational paradigm for effectively harnessing LLMs in recommender systems.

Conversion and conversion rate (CVR) prediction play a critical role in efficient advertising decision-making. In past decades, although researchers have developed plenty of models for CVR prediction, the methodological evolution and relationships between different techniques have been precluded. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on CVR prediction in online advertising, and classify state-of-the-art CVR prediction models into six categories with respect to the underlying techniques and elaborate on connections between these techniques. For each category of models, we present the framework of underlying techniques, their advantages and disadvantages, and discuss how they are utilized for CVR prediction. Moreover, we summarize the performance of various CVR prediction models on public and proprietary datasets. Finally, we identify research trends, major challenges, and promising future directions. We observe that results of performance evaluation reported in prior studies are not unanimous; semantics-enriched, attribution-enhanced, debiased CVR prediction and jointly modeling CTR and CVR prediction would be promising directions to explore in the future. This review is expected to provide valuable references and insights for future researchers and practitioners in this area.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have transformed image captioning, shifting from concise captions to detailed descriptions. We introduce LOTUS, a leaderboard for evaluating detailed captions, addressing three main gaps in existing evaluations: lack of standardized criteria, bias-aware assessments, and user preference considerations. LOTUS comprehensively evaluates various aspects, including caption quality (e.g., alignment, descriptiveness), risks (\eg, hallucination), and societal biases (e.g., gender bias) while enabling preference-oriented evaluations by tailoring criteria to diverse user preferences. Our analysis of recent LVLMs reveals no single model excels across all criteria, while correlations emerge between caption detail and bias risks. Preference-oriented evaluations demonstrate that optimal model selection depends on user priorities.