Socially interactive agents are gaining prominence in domains like healthcare, education, and service contexts, particularly virtual agents due to their inherent scalability. To facilitate authentic interactions, these systems require verbal and nonverbal communication through e.g., facial expressions and gestures. While natural language processing technologies have rapidly advanced, incorporating human-like nonverbal behavior into real-world interaction contexts is crucial for enhancing the success of communication, yet this area remains underexplored. One barrier is creating autonomous systems with sophisticated conversational abilities that integrate human-like nonverbal behavior. This paper presents a distributed architecture using Epic Games MetaHuman, combined with advanced conversational AI and camera-based user management, that supports methods like motion capture, handcrafted animation, and generative approaches for nonverbal behavior. We share insights into a system architecture designed to investigate nonverbal behavior in socially interactive agents, deployed in a three-week field study in the Deutsches Museum Bonn, showcasing its potential in realistic nonverbal behavior research.

As part of an ongoing investigation into X, the European Commission has requested documents from the company related to how its recommendation systems work. The European Union's regulatory arm is particularly interested in any recent changes to the algorithm. The EC said it asked X to provide the information by February 15 as it steps up the Digital Services Act (DSA) probe. On top of that, regulators asked for access to certain APIs that X provides so it can conduct "direct fact-finding on content moderation and virality of accounts." The Commission has also slapped X with a retention order.

The hosts of "Uncanny Valley" spent the week following the advice of AI chatbots when it came to shopping, fitness, and parenting. Here’s how it went.

Understanding users' product preferences is essential to the efficacy of a recommendation system. Precision marketing leverages users' historical data to discern these preferences and recommends products that align with them. However, recent browsing and purchase records might better reflect current purchasing inclinations. Transformer-based recommendation systems have made strides in sequential recommendation tasks, but they often fall short in utilizing product image style information and shopping cart data effectively. In light of this, we propose Style4Rec, a transformer-based e-commerce recommendation system that harnesses style and shopping cart information to enhance existing transformer-based sequential product recommendation systems. Style4Rec represents a significant step forward in personalized e-commerce recommendations, outperforming benchmarks across various evaluation metrics. Style4Rec resulted in notable improvements: HR@5 increased from 0.681 to 0.735, NDCG@5 increased from 0.594 to 0.674, and MRR@5 increased from 0.559 to 0.654. We tested our model using an e-commerce dataset from our partnering company and found that it exceeded established transformer-based sequential recommendation benchmarks across various evaluation metrics. Thus, Style4Rec presents a significant step forward in personalized e-commerce recommendation systems.

Graph convolution networks (GCNs) for recommendations have emerged as an important research topic due to their ability to exploit higher-order neighbors. Despite their success, most of them suffer from the popularity bias brought by a small number of active users and popular items. Also, a real-world user-item bipartite graph contains many noisy interactions, which may hamper the sensitive GCNs. Most existing works typically perform graph augmentation to create multiple views of the original graph by randomly dropping edges/nodes or relying on predefined rules, and these augmented views always serve as an auxiliary task by maximizing their correspondence. However, we argue that the graph structures generated from these vanilla approaches may be suboptimal, and maximizing their correspondence will force the representation to capture information irrelevant for the recommendation task.

Bryan, Christina, and our guest host Outward Producer Palace Shaw, tackle the perplexing world of bisexual dads navigating dating apps, strategies for dealing with transphobic relatives during family gatherings, the dos and don'ts of art-gifting etiquette, and whether to fess up to a messy post-divorce disclosure. This week, we've got something for all your senses.

This paper demonstrates the successful application of Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) to accelerate recommender system development and optimization at Adyen, a global leader in financial payment processing. Facing the limitations of traditional A/B testing, which proved slow, costly, and often inconclusive, we integrated OPE to enable rapid evaluation of new recommender system variants using historical data. Our analysis, conducted on a billion-scale dataset of transactions, reveals a strong correlation between OPE estimates and online A/B test results, projecting an incremental 9--54 million transactions over a six-month period. We explore the practical challenges and trade-offs associated with deploying OPE in a high-volume production environment, including leveraging exploration traffic for data collection, mitigating variance in importance sampling, and ensuring scalability through the use of Apache Spark. By benchmarking various OPE estimators, we provide guidance on their effectiveness and integration into the decision-making systems for large-scale industrial payment systems.

Federated learning has become an important research area in 'private computing' due to the 'useable invisibility' of data during training. Inspired by Federated learning, the federated recommendation system has gradually become a new recommendation service architecture that can protect users' privacy. The use of user diagrams to enhance federated recommendations is a promising topic. How to use user diagrams to enhance federated recommendations is a promising research topic. However, it's a great challenge to construct a user diagram without compromising privacy in a federated learning scenario. Inspired by the simple idea that similar users often have the same attribute characteristics, we propose a personalized federated recommendation algorithm based on the user relationship graph constructed by the user text characteristics(Graph Federation Recommendation System based on User Text description Features, UFGraphFR). The method uses the embedding layer weight of the user's text feature description to construct the user relationship graph. It introduces the Transformer mechanism to capture the sequence modeling of the user's historical interaction sequence. Without access to user history interactions and specific user attributes, the federal learning privacy protection of data 'useable invisibility' is embodied. Preliminary experiments on some benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of UFGraphFR. Our experiments show that this model can protect user privacy to some extent without affecting the performance of the recommendation system. The code will be easily available on https://github.com/trueWangSyutung/UFGraphFR.

In this paper, we present a methodology for the development of embodied conversational agents for social virtual worlds. The agents provide multimodal communication with their users in which speech interaction is included. Our proposal combines different techniques related to Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Affective Computing, and User Modeling. Firstly, the developed conversational agents. A statistical methodology has been developed to model the system conversational behavior, which is learned from an initial corpus and improved with the knowledge acquired from the successive interactions. In addition, the selection of the next system response is adapted considering information stored into users profiles and also the emotional contents detected in the users utterances. Our proposal has been evaluated with the successful development of an embodied conversational agent which has been placed in the Second Life social virtual world. The avatar includes the different models and interacts with the users who inhabit the virtual world in order to provide academic information. The experimental results show that the agents conversational behavior adapts successfully to the specific characteristics of users interacting in such environments.

Smart speakers have become the ultimate multitaskers for your home, combining great sound with the convenience of voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri. Whether you're streaming your favorite playlists, checking the weather, controlling your smart home devices or setting reminders hands free, a good smart speaker can make your day-to-day life a whole lot easier -- and more fun, too. If you're an audiophile, some models prioritize high-quality sound that can fill a room. If you're on a budget, there are plenty of affordable options that still pack in tons of features. And if you're deep into the smart home ecosystem, finding a speaker that seamlessly connects to your devices will be a game-changer. We've picked out the best smart speakers for every need, whether you're after booming bass, a sleek design or advanced voice assistant capabilities.