Personal Assistant Systems
Young men shifting to political right is causing women to distrust dating apps, says Atlantic writer
Atlantic writer Faith Hill claimed that women have developed a distrust of dating apps due to young men becoming more conservative during an appearance on CNN's "The Assignment with Audie Cornish" on Thursday. Young men's shift to the political right has complicated the dating world and led to distrust by women of dating apps, according to The Atlantic writer Faith Hill, who appeared on CNN on Thursday. Hill argued that women's growing distrust of dating apps stems from men -- young men in particular -- becoming more conservative while young women are becoming more progressive, leading to the sexes "growing further apart in a lot of ways." "You see that young men are moving further to the right. And I think for a lot of women in particular, it can just sort of feel like, 'This is not a time where I trust men -- I feel respected by men. I don't necessarily want to go out and meet strangers who are men,'" Hill said.
OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service
Wei, Zhipeng, Cai, Kuo, She, Junda, Chen, Jie, Chen, Minghao, Zeng, Yang, Luo, Qiang, Zeng, Wencong, Tang, Ruiming, Gai, Kun, Zhou, Guorui
Local life service is a vital scenario in Kuaishou App, where video recommendation is intrinsically linked with store's location information. Thus, recommendation in our scenario is challenging because we should take into account user's interest and real-time location at the same time. In the face of such complex scenarios, end-to-end generative recommendation has emerged as a new paradigm, such as OneRec in the short video scenario, OneSug in the search scenario, and EGA in the advertising scenario. However, in local life service, an end-to-end generative recommendation model has not yet been developed as there are some key challenges to be solved. The first challenge is how to make full use of geographic information. The second challenge is how to balance multiple objectives, including user interests, the distance between user and stores, and some other business objectives. To address the challenges, we propose OneLoc. Specifically, we leverage geographic information from different perspectives: (1) geo-aware semantic ID incorporates both video and geographic information for tokenization, (2) geo-aware self-attention in the encoder leverages both video location similarity and user's real-time location, and (3) neighbor-aware prompt captures rich context information surrounding users for generation. To balance multiple objectives, we use reinforcement learning and propose two reward functions, i.e., geographic reward and GMV reward. With the above design, OneLoc achieves outstanding offline and online performance. In fact, OneLoc has been deployed in local life service of Kuaishou App. It serves 400 million active users daily, achieving 21.016% and 17.891% improvements in terms of gross merchandise value (GMV) and orders numbers.
MISS: Multi-Modal Tree Indexing and Searching with Lifelong Sequential Behavior for Retrieval Recommendation
Guo, Chengcheng, She, Junda, Cai, Kuo, Wang, Shiyao, Hu, Qigen, Luo, Qiang, Gai, Kun, Zhou, Guorui
Large-scale industrial recommendation systems typically employ a two-stage paradigm of retrieval and ranking to handle huge amounts of information. Recent research focuses on improving the performance of retrieval model. A promising way is to introduce extensive information about users and items. On one hand, lifelong sequential behavior is valuable. Existing lifelong behavior modeling methods in ranking stage focus on the interaction of lifelong behavior and candidate items from retrieval stage. In retrieval stage, it is difficult to utilize lifelong behavior because of a large corpus of candidate items. On the other hand, existing retrieval methods mostly relay on interaction information, potentially disregarding valuable multi-modal information. To solve these problems, we represent the pioneering exploration of leveraging multi-modal information and lifelong sequence model within the advanced tree-based retrieval model. We propose Multi-modal Indexing and Searching with lifelong Sequence (MISS), which contains a multi-modal index tree and a multi-modal lifelong sequence modeling module. Specifically, for better index structure, we propose multi-modal index tree, which is built using the multi-modal embedding to precisely represent item similarity. To precisely capture diverse user interests in user lifelong sequence, we propose collaborative general search unit (Co-GSU) and multi-modal general search unit (MM-GSU) for multi-perspective interests searching.
Dual-Phase Playtime-guided Recommendation: Interest Intensity Exploration and Multimodal Random Walks
Zhang, Jingmao, Zhao, Zhiting, Lin, Yunqi, Ma, Jianghong, Wei, Tianjun, Zhang, Haijun, Zhang, Xiaofeng
The explosive growth of the video game industry has created an urgent need for recommendation systems that can scale with expanding catalogs and maintain user engagement. While prior work has explored accuracy and diversity in recommendations, existing models underutilize playtime, a rich behavioral signal unique to gaming platforms, and overlook the potential of multimodal information to enhance diversity. In this paper, we propose DP2Rec, a novel Dual-Phase Playtime-guided Recommendation model designed to jointly optimize accuracy and diversity. First, we introduce a playtime-guided interest intensity exploration module that separates strong and weak preferences via dual-beta modeling, enabling fine-grained user profiling and more accurate recommendations. Second, we present a playtime-guided multimodal random walks module that simulates player exploration using transitions guided by both playtime-derived interest similarity and multimodal semantic similarity. This mechanism preserves core preferences while promoting cross-category discovery through latent semantic associations and adaptive category balancing. Extensive experiments on a real-world game dataset show that DP2Rec outperforms existing methods in both recommendation accuracy and diversity.
Hybrid-Hierarchical Fashion Graph Attention Network for Compatibility-Oriented and Personalized Outfit Recommendation
Saed, Sajjad, Teimourpour, Babak
The rapid expansion of the fashion industry and the growing variety of products have made it increasingly challenging for users to identify compatible items on e-commerce platforms. Effective fashion recommendation systems are therefore crucial for filtering irrelevant options and suggesting suitable ones. However, simultaneously addressing outfit compatibility and personalized recommendations remains a significant challenge, as these aspects are typically treated independently in existing studies, thereby overlooking the complex interactions between items and user preferences. This research introduces a new framework named FGAT, which leverages a hierarchical graph representation together with graph attention mechanisms to address this problem. The framework constructs a three-tier graph of users, outfits, and items, integrating visual and textual features to jointly model outfit compatibility and user preferences. By dynamically weighting node importance during representation propagation, the graph attention mechanism captures key interactions and produces precise embeddings for both user preferences and outfit compatibility. Evaluated on the POG dataset, FGAT outperforms strong baselines such as HFGN, achieving notable improvements in accuracy, precision, HR, recall, and NDCG. These results demonstrate that combining multimodal visual and textual features with a hierarchical graph structure and attention mechanisms significantly enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of personalized fashion recommendation systems.
Personalized Contest Recommendation in Fantasy Sports
Srilakshmi, Madiraju, Kothari, Kartavya, Marathe, Kamlesh, Chigurupati, Vedavyas, Kapoor, Hitesh
In daily fantasy sports, players enter into "contests" where they compete against each other by building teams of athletes that score fantasy points based on what actually occurs in a real-life sports match. For any given sports match, there are a multitude of contests available to players, with substantial variation across 3 main dimensions: entry fee, number of spots, and the prize pool distribution. As player preferences are also quite heterogeneous, contest personalization is an important tool to match players with contests. This paper presents a scalable contest recommendation system, powered by a Wide and Deep Interaction Ranker (WiDIR) at its core. We productionized this system at our company, one of the large fantasy sports platforms with millions of daily contests and millions of players, where online experiments show a marked improvement over other candidate models in terms of recall and other critical business metrics.
Google snuck a new smart speaker into its big Pixel event
Over the past several months, the question surrounding Google's next smart devices hasn't been when they will arrive, but if they will arrive. After all, Google's been slowly but steadily discontinuing older smart products (the Nest Protect, the Nest x Yale Lock) while leaving their replacements to third parties. At time same time, its aging line of Nest smart speakers and displays has been languishing. But Google has previously hinted that new Google Home smart devices are on tap for later this year, and during the company's big Made by Google event today, we may have gotten a glimpse of one. During some pre-recorded banter between Milwaukee Bucks player Giannis Antetokounmpo and F1 driver Lando Norris, the camera panned over to reveal a small, slightly squished sphere with a gray exterior and a telltale light ring encircling its narrow base.
Gemini is coming to Google's smart speakers and displays this fall
We already knew that Google Assistant was soon to be replaced by a "new experience powered by Gemini." Now we know what that new experience will be called, and when it's arriving. Gemini for Home is the name of the new Gemini-powered voice assistant for Google smart speakers and displays, including the current Nest Audio, Nest Mini, Nest Hub, and Nest Hub Max. "Early access" to Gemini for Home kicks off in October, Google announced in a blog post Wednesday, with both free and paid versions available. Google didn't say how much the paid version of Gemini for Home will cost.
Adversarial Music: Real world Audio Adversary against Wake-word Detection System
Juncheng Li, Shuhui Qu, Xinjian Li, Joseph Szurley, J. Zico Kolter, Florian Metze
V oice Assistants (V As) such as Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant rely on wake-word detection to respond to people's commands, which could potentially be vulnerable to audio adversarial examples. In this work, we target our attack on the wake-word detection system, jamming the model with some inconspicuous background music to deactivate the V As while our audio adversary is present. We implemented an emulated wake-word detection system of Amazon Alexa based on recent publications.