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Reviews: Joint Optimization of Tree-based Index and Deep Model for Recommender Systems

Neural Information Processing Systems

The results presented for this work beats the benchmarks by a good deal, and in particular, the online test results are very good. It is an incremental improvement to an existing model (TDM) by doing an additional optimization step. The resulting improvement is impressive, though, and it feels like this would be more applicable to an applied data science conference such as KDD or WWW. The explanation of TDM in Section 2.1 is helpful, but it would be even more helpful to have a direct comparison between the tree building steps between TDM and the new proposed method. For example, having a side-by-side comparison of Algorithms1 & 2 with its TDM predecessor would go a long way in understanding detailed differences.


Reviews: Joint Optimization of Tree-based Index and Deep Model for Recommender Systems

Neural Information Processing Systems

The review scores were somewhat borderline, but overall slightly above the acceptance threshold. There was some disagreement among the reviewers, following which a discussion was initiated. The rebuttal largely addresses the concerns of R1 (the most negative review), and in the metareviewer's opinion does a reasonable job of addressing these concerns, which are mostly clarifications regarding the performance of the algorithm. Positively, the reviewers mostly concur that the method, while fairly straightforward, offers significant improvements over existing techniques. After discussion there was some positive movement in review scores resulting in a positive consensus among reviewers.


Paper Quality Assessment based on Individual Wisdom Metrics from Open Peer Review

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study proposes a data-driven framework for enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of scientific peer review through an open, bottom-up process that estimates reviewer quality. Traditional closed peer review systems, while essential for quality control, are often slow, costly, and subject to biases that can impede scientific progress. Here, we introduce a method that evaluates individual reviewer reliability by quantifying agreement with community consensus scores and applying Bayesian weighting to refine paper quality assessments. We analyze open peer review data from two major scientific conferences, and demonstrate that reviewer-specific quality scores significantly improve the reliability of paper quality estimation. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that reviewer quality scores are unrelated to authorship quality. Our model incorporates incentive structures to recognize high-quality reviewers and encourage broader coverage of submitted papers, thereby mitigating the common "rich-get-richer" pitfall of social media. These findings suggest that open peer review, with mechanisms for estimating and incentivizing reviewer quality, offers a scalable and equitable alternative for scientific publishing, with potential to enhance the speed, fairness, and transparency of the peer review process.


Stop talking to your phone: How to use Type to Siri

Popular Science

Among the changes ushered in with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS 15.1 Sequoia is a new Type to Siri option. This means you can carry on a conversation with Apple's digital assistant without having to talk out loud, which is helpful when you're in a quiet library, busy subway car, or anywhere else you can't really use voice control. The ability to type to Siri has actually been available on Apple devices for several years now, but previously it was hidden away in the Accessibility settings and not all that easy to find. Now Apple has given it much more prominence in its operating systems, so typing is just as straightforward as talking. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday.


Review for NeurIPS paper: Simplify and Robustify Negative Sampling for Implicit Collaborative Filtering

Neural Information Processing Systems

Weaknesses: I don't think the proposed algorithm to leverage the variance is fully sound. The user memory set Mu is updated on each iteration by first uniformly sampling additional items and then retaining those with higher scores (with probability proportional to softmax of the score). First, for datasets that have lots of items, uniform sampling is very unlikely to produce hard negatives with high scores so this procedure can be highly inefficient. Second, since new samples are likely to have lower scores, one either has to increase the temperature or leave Mu relatively static between iterations. If Mu is static then training can saturate and the model can overfit to these negative examples.


Review for NeurIPS paper: Simplify and Robustify Negative Sampling for Implicit Collaborative Filtering

Neural Information Processing Systems

The initial reviews were mixed for this paper. However, during the discussion, a certain consensus emerged regarding the value of this contribution. In particular, the reviews agree that the proposed method is simple and effective. In the proposed study, the method seems to outperform (by a small margin) others consistently. The main negative is the high computational and memory cost of the approach.


The best smart home gadgets for 2025

Engadget

If it feels like every piece of home tech is now "smart," you're not far off. The smart home space has grown exponentially in the past few years to include speakers, cameras, locks, lights and even kitchen appliances. There are also different voice assistants and IoT standards to consider, all of which can make it confusing (to say the least) to build your smart home ecosystem from the ground up. Allow us at Engadget to help with that. We've tested dozens of smart home gadgets over the years and continue to test the latest offerings to see which work well and are worth your money. We recommend, before you even dive in, to resist the urge to outfit your whole home in one go.


Review for NeurIPS paper: Trading Personalization for Accuracy: Data Debugging in Collaborative Filtering

Neural Information Processing Systems

The proposed algorithm is limited to matrix factorization model, and can be hardly extended to more state-of-art neural network-based latent factor models proposed in recent years. Because the derivate of model parameters with respect to training labels in Equation (7) needs to be a closed form solution as in matrix factorization. This may restrict a broader impact of the proposed solution. I'm concerned about the authors' claim on the trade-off between personalization and accuracy. As emphasized in the title, the authors consider the performance gain of the proposed algorithm as trading personalization for accuracy, but there is no direct empirical evaluation evidence to support this claim.


Review for NeurIPS paper: Trading Personalization for Accuracy: Data Debugging in Collaborative Filtering

Neural Information Processing Systems

The paper received overall very positive scores (after communication through author response). All the reviewers agree that the paper made a very interesting contribution from a novel angle to understand the tradeoff between "over-personalization" and accuracy. The empirical results provide convincing support for the claim. I suggest the authors incorporate the feedback from the reviewers in the revision.


Yes, Minister character is government's new AI assistant

BBC News

Most of the tools in the Humphrey suite are generative AI models - in this case, technology which takes large amounts of information and summarises it in a more digestible format - to be used by the civil service. Among them is Consult, which summarises people's responses to public calls for information. The government says this is currently done by expensive external consultants who bill the taxpayer "around 100,000 every time." Parlex, which the government says helps policymakers search through previous parliamentary debates on a certain topic, is described by The Times as "designed to avoid catastrophic political rows by predicting how MPs will respond". Other changes announced include more efficient data sharing between departments.