Personal Assistant Systems
Attention-guided Spectrogram Sequence Modeling with CNNs for Music Genre Classification
Music genre classification is a critical component of music recommendation systems, generation algorithms, and cultural analytics. In this work, we present an innovative model for classifying music genres using attention-based temporal signature modeling. By processing spectrogram sequences through Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and multi-head attention layers, our approach captures the most temporally significant moments within each piece, crafting a unique "signature" for genre identification. This temporal focus not only enhances classification accuracy but also reveals insights into genre-specific characteristics that can be intuitively mapped to listener perceptions. Our findings offer potential applications in personalized music recommendation systems by highlighting cross-genre similarities and distinctiveness, aligning closely with human musical intuition. This work bridges the gap between technical classification tasks and the nuanced, human experience of genre.
Leveraging AI and NLP for Bank Marketing: A Systematic Review and Gap Analysis
Gerling, Christopher, Lessmann, Stefan
This paper explores the growing impact of AI and NLP in bank marketing, highlighting their evolving roles in enhancing marketing strategies, improving customer engagement, and creating value within this sector. While AI and NLP have been widely studied in general marketing, there is a notable gap in understanding their specific applications and potential within the banking sector. This research addresses this specific gap by providing a systematic review and strategic analysis of AI and NLP applications in bank marketing, focusing on their integration across the customer journey and operational excellence. Employing the PRISMA methodology, this study systematically reviews existing literature to assess the current landscape of AI and NLP in bank marketing. Additionally, it incorporates semantic mapping using Sentence Transformers and UMAP for strategic gap analysis to identify underexplored areas and opportunities for future research. The systematic review reveals limited research specifically focused on NLP applications in bank marketing. The strategic gap analysis identifies key areas where NLP can further enhance marketing strategies, including customer-centric applications like acquisition, retention, and personalized engagement, offering valuable insights for both academic research and practical implementation. This research contributes to the field of bank marketing by mapping the current state of AI and NLP applications and identifying strategic gaps. The findings provide actionable insights for developing NLP-driven growth and innovation frameworks and highlight the role of NLP in improving operational efficiency and regulatory compliance. This work has broader implications for enhancing customer experience, profitability, and innovation in the banking industry.
Taming the Long Tail in Human Mobility Prediction
Xu, Xiaohang, Jiang, Renhe, Yang, Chuang, Fan, Zipei, Sezaki, Kaoru
With the popularity of location-based services, human mobility prediction plays a key role in enhancing personalized navigation, optimizing recommendation systems, and facilitating urban mobility and planning. This involves predicting a user's next POI (point-of-interest) visit using their past visit history. However, the uneven distribution of visitations over time and space, namely the long-tail problem in spatial distribution, makes it difficult for AI models to predict those POIs that are less visited by humans. In light of this issue, we propose the Long-Tail Adjusted Next POI Prediction (LoTNext) framework for mobility prediction, combining a Long-Tailed Graph Adjustment module to reduce the impact of the long-tailed nodes in the user-POI interaction graph and a novel Long-Tailed Loss Adjustment module to adjust loss by logit score and sample weight adjustment strategy. Also, we employ the auxiliary prediction task to enhance generalization and accuracy. Our experiments with two real-world trajectory datasets demonstrate that LoTNext significantly surpasses existing state-of-the-art works. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yukayo/LoTNext.
The best productivity presents for home and office in 2024
We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. The line between home and office has never been blurrier, so getting someone you love a gift that helps them cut down on their list of chores, improve their productivity, or help them relax has become incredibly thoughtful. This can mean gifting something practical, like a more comfortable office chair or an extravagantly large 4K TV. Many of these gifts are appropriate for both homeowners and renters, too. If you live with the person you're gifting these home upgrades to, you also benefit, which is a nice holiday bonus. One of the keys to a happy home during the holidays (or any other time) is a smart home, and a smart home needs a fast, consistent connection to the Internet. Eero's latest Wi-Fi routers support the latest wireless standard (Wi-Fi 6E), supporting speeds of up to 2.3 Gbps. For reference, Netflix recommends just 15Mbps to stream video in 4K, which is only .006% of the routers' total potential bandwidth. If you're shopping for someone who pays for a fast internet connection but finds their devices don't get the speeds promised--or they have places in their home where their wireless connection is spotty--this is the optimal solution. Amazon says this two-pack of Eero routers can cover an area of up to 4,000 sq. Every home or office needs an all-in-one printer for when a document needs to be scanned, printed, or copied.
Monolithic Hybrid Recommender System for Suggesting Relevant Movies
Recommendation systems have become the fundamental services to facilitate users information access. Generally, recommendation system works by filtering historical behaviors to understand and learn users preferences. With the growth of online information, recommendations have become of crucial importance in information filtering to prevent the information overload problem. In this study, we considered hybrid post-fusion of two approaches of collaborative filtering, by using sequences of watched movies and considering the related movies rating. After considering both techniques and applying the weights matrix, the recommendations would be modified to correspond to the users preference as needed. We discussed that various weights would be set based on use cases. For instance, in cases where we have the rating for most classes, we will assign a higher weight to the rating matrix and in case where the rating is unavailable for the majority of cases, the higher weights might be assigned to the sequential dataset. An extensive discussion is made in the context of this paper. Sequential type of the watched movies was used in conjunction of the rating as especially that model might be inadequate in distinguishing users long-term preference and that does not account for the rating of the watched movies and thus that model along might not suffice. Extensive discussion was made regarding the literature and methodological approach to solve the problem.
Unveiling User Preferences: A Knowledge Graph and LLM-Driven Approach for Conversational Recommendation
Qiu, Zhangchi, Luo, Linhao, Pan, Shirui, Liew, Alan Wee-Chung
Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) aim to provide personalized recommendations through dynamically capturing user preferences in interactive conversations. Conventional CRSs often extract user preferences as hidden representations, which are criticized for their lack of interpretability. This diminishes the transparency and trustworthiness of the recommendation process. Recent works have explored combining the impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the domain-specific knowledge of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to generate human-understandable recommendation explanations. Despite these efforts, the integration of LLMs and KGs for CRSs remains challenging due to the modality gap between unstructured dialogues and structured KGs. Moreover, LLMs pre-trained on large-scale corpora may not be well-suited for analyzing user preferences, which require domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we propose COMPASS, a plug-and-play framework that synergizes LLMs and KGs to unveil user preferences, enhancing the performance and explainability of existing CRSs. To address integration challenges, COMPASS employs a two-stage training approach: first, it bridges the gap between the structured KG and natural language through an innovative graph entity captioning pre-training mechanism. This enables the LLM to transform KG entities into concise natural language descriptions, allowing them to comprehend domain-specific knowledge. Following, COMPASS optimizes user preference modeling via knowledge-aware instruction fine-tuning, where the LLM learns to reason and summarize user preferences from both dialogue histories and KG-augmented context. This enables COMPASS to perform knowledge-aware reasoning and generate comprehensive and interpretable user preferences that can seamlessly integrate with existing CRS models for improving recommendation performance and explainability.
Generalist Virtual Agents: A Survey on Autonomous Agents Across Digital Platforms
Gao, Minghe, Bu, Wendong, Miao, Bingchen, Wu, Yang, Li, Yunfei, Li, Juncheng, Tang, Siliang, Wu, Qi, Zhuang, Yueting, Wang, Meng
In this paper, we introduce the Generalist Virtual Agent (GVA), an autonomous entity engineered to function across diverse digital platforms and environments, assisting users by executing a variety of tasks. This survey delves into the evolution of GVAs, tracing their progress from early intelligent assistants to contemporary implementations that incorporate large-scale models. We explore both the philosophical underpinnings and practical foundations of GVAs, addressing their developmental challenges and the methodologies currently employed in their design and operation. By presenting a detailed taxonomy of GVA environments, tasks, and capabilities, this paper aims to bridge the theoretical and practical aspects of GVAs, concluding those that operate in environments closely mirroring the real world are more likely to demonstrate human-like intelligence. We discuss potential future directions for GVA research, highlighting the necessity for realistic evaluation metrics and the enhancement of long-sequence decision-making capabilities to advance the field toward more systematic or embodied applications. This work not only synthesizes the existing body of literature but also proposes frameworks for future investigations, contributing significantly to the ongoing development of intelligent systems.
Introduction to AI Safety, Ethics, and Society
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly embedding itself within militaries, economies, and societies, reshaping their very foundations. Given the depth and breadth of its consequences, it has never been more pressing to understand how to ensure that AI systems are safe, ethical, and have a positive societal impact. This book aims to provide a comprehensive approach to understanding AI risk. Our primary goals include consolidating fragmented knowledge on AI risk, increasing the precision of core ideas, and reducing barriers to entry by making content simpler and more comprehensible. The book has been designed to be accessible to readers from diverse backgrounds. You do not need to have studied AI, philosophy, or other such topics. The content is skimmable and somewhat modular, so that you can choose which chapters to read. We introduce mathematical formulas in a few places to specify claims more precisely, but readers should be able to understand the main points without these.
KuaiFormer: Transformer-Based Retrieval at Kuaishou
Liu, Chi, Cao, Jiangxia, Huang, Rui, Zheng, Kai, Luo, Qiang, Gai, Kun, Zhou, Guorui
In large-scale content recommendation systems, retrieval serves as the initial stage in the pipeline, responsible for selecting thousands of candidate items from billions of options to pass on to ranking modules. Traditionally, the dominant retrieval method has been Embedding-Based Retrieval (EBR) using a Deep Neural Network (DNN) dual-tower structure. However, applying transformer in retrieval tasks has been the focus of recent research, though real-world industrial deployment still presents significant challenges. In this paper, we introduce KuaiFormer, a novel transformer-based retrieval framework deployed in a large-scale content recommendation system. KuaiFormer fundamentally redefines the retrieval process by shifting from conventional score estimation tasks (such as click-through rate estimate) to a transformer-driven Next Action Prediction paradigm. This shift enables more effective real-time interest acquisition and multi-interest extraction, significantly enhancing retrieval performance. KuaiFormer has been successfully integrated into Kuaishou App's short-video recommendation system since May 2024, serving over 400 million daily active users and resulting in a marked increase in average daily usage time of Kuaishou users. We provide insights into both the technical and business aspects of deploying transformer in large-scale recommendation systems, addressing practical challenges encountered during industrial implementation. Our findings offer valuable guidance for engineers and researchers aiming to leverage transformer models to optimize large-scale content recommendation systems.
Let people fail! Exploring the influence of explainable virtual and robotic agents in learning-by-doing tasks
Matarese, Marco, Rea, Francesco, Rohlfing, Katharina J., Sciutti, Alessandra
Collaborative decision-making with artificial intelligence (AI) agents presents opportunities and challenges. While human-AI performance often surpasses that of individuals, the impact of such technology on human behavior remains insufficiently understood, primarily when AI agents can provide justifiable explanations for their suggestions. This study compares the effects of classic vs. partner-aware explanations on human behavior and performance during a learning-by-doing task. Three participant groups were involved: one interacting with a computer, another with a humanoid robot, and a third one without assistance. Results indicated that partner-aware explanations influenced participants differently based on the type of artificial agents involved. With the computer, participants enhanced their task completion times. At the same time, those interacting with the humanoid robot were more inclined to follow its suggestions, although they did not reduce their timing. Interestingly, participants autonomously performing the learning-by-doing task demonstrated superior knowledge acquisition than those assisted by explainable AI (XAI). These findings raise profound questions and have significant implications for automated tutoring and human-AI collaboration.