Personal Assistant Systems
Generative Diffusion Models for Sequential Recommendations
Zolghadr, Sharare, Winther, Ole, Jeha, Paul
Generative models such as Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown promise in sequential recommendation tasks. However, they face challenges, including posterior collapse and limited representation capacity. The work by Li et al. (2023) introduces a novel approach that leverages diffusion models to address these challenges by representing item embeddings as distributions rather than fixed vectors. This approach allows for a more adaptive reflection of users' diverse interests and various item aspects. During the diffusion phase, the model converts the target item embedding into a Gaussian distribution by adding noise, facilitating the representation of sequential item distributions and the injection of uncertainty. An Approximator then processes this noisy item representation to reconstruct the target item. In the reverse phase, the model utilizes users' past interactions to reverse the noise and finalize the item prediction through a rounding operation. This research introduces enhancements to the DiffuRec architecture, particularly by adding offset noise in the diffusion process to improve robustness and incorporating a cross-attention mechanism in the Approximator to better capture relevant user-item interactions. These contributions led to the development of a new model, DiffuRecSys, which improves performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that these modifications enhance item representation, effectively capture diverse user preferences, and outperform existing baselines in sequential recommendation research.
Personality Analysis from Online Short Video Platforms with Multi-domain Adaptation
An, Sixu, Sun, Xiangguo, Li, Yicong, Yang, Yu, Xu, Guandong
Personality analysis from online short videos has gained prominence due to its applications in personalized recommendation systems, sentiment analysis, and human-computer interaction. Traditional assessment methods, such as questionnaires based on the Big Five Personality Framework, are limited by self-report biases and are impractical for large-scale or real-time analysis. Leveraging the rich, multi-modal data present in short videos offers a promising alternative for more accurate personality inference. However, integrating these diverse and asynchronous modalities poses significant challenges, particularly in aligning time-varying data and ensuring models generalize well to new domains with limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal personality analysis framework that addresses these challenges by synchronizing and integrating features from multiple modalities and enhancing model generalization through domain adaptation. We introduce a timestamp-based modality alignment mechanism that synchronizes data based on spoken word timestamps, ensuring accurate correspondence across modalities and facilitating effective feature integration. To capture temporal dependencies and inter-modal interactions, we employ Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory networks and self-attention mechanisms, allowing the model to focus on the most informative features for personality prediction. Furthermore, we develop a gradient-based domain adaptation method that transfers knowledge from multiple source domains to improve performance in target domains with scarce labeled data. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in personality prediction tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in capturing complex behavioral cues and robustness in adapting to new domains.
TEARS: Textual Representations for Scrutable Recommendations
Penaloza, Emiliano, Gouvert, Olivier, Wu, Haolun, Charlin, Laurent
Traditional recommender systems rely on high-dimensional (latent) embeddings for modeling user-item interactions, often resulting in opaque representations that lack interpretability. Moreover, these systems offer limited control to users over their recommendations. Inspired by recent work, we introduce TExtuAl Representations for Scrutable recommendations (TEARS) to address these challenges. Instead of representing a user's interests through a latent embedding, TEARS encodes them in natural text, providing transparency and allowing users to edit them. To do so, TEARS uses a modern LLM to generate user summaries based on user preferences. We find the summaries capture user preferences uniquely. Using these summaries, we take a hybrid approach where we use an optimal transport procedure to align the summaries' representation with the learned representation of a standard VAE for collaborative filtering. We find this approach can surpass the performance of three popular VAE models while providing user-controllable recommendations. We also analyze the controllability of TEARS through three simulated user tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of a user editing its summary.
Knowledge Graph Enhanced Language Agents for Recommendation
Guo, Taicheng, Liu, Chaochun, Wang, Hai, Mannam, Varun, Wang, Fang, Chen, Xin, Zhang, Xiangliang, Reddy, Chandan K.
Language agents have recently been used to simulate human behavior and user-item interactions for recommendation systems. However, current language agent simulations do not understand the relationships between users and items, leading to inaccurate user profiles and ineffective recommendations. In this work, we explore the utility of Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which contain extensive and reliable relationships between users and items, for recommendation. Our key insight is that the paths in a KG can capture complex relationships between users and items, eliciting the underlying reasons for user preferences and enriching user profiles. Leveraging this insight, we propose Knowledge Graph Enhanced Language Agents(KGLA), a framework that unifies language agents and KG for recommendation systems. In the simulated recommendation scenario, we position the user and item within the KG and integrate KG paths as natural language descriptions into the simulation. This allows language agents to interact with each other and discover sufficient rationale behind their interactions, making the simulation more accurate and aligned with real-world cases, thus improving recommendation performance. Our experimental results show that KGLA significantly improves recommendation performance (with a 33%-95% boost in NDCG@1 among three widely used benchmarks) compared to the previous best baseline method.
Remotely control your outlets with Kasa Smart Plugs, now 2 for 13
Ever wish you could turn a particular outlet on and off without using a physical light switch? Maybe for an outlet that isn't even hooked up to a light switch? And right now, you can grab a two-pack of Kasa Smart Plugs for just 13 on Amazon, which is 35 percent off its normal 20 price. If you don't want two, you can get the one-pack for just 8. Imagine it's time to sleep, so you leave the living room and lay down in your bed, get comfy, and you're ready to drift off -- when you suddenly remember that you didn't turn off the lamp. The Kasa Smart Plugs also support voice commands, allowing you to exercise hands-free control over your home devices via Alexa or Google Home Assistant.
Autonomous Building Cyber-Physical Systems Using Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, Digital Twins, and Large Language Model
Ly, Reachsak, Shojaei, Alireza
Current autonomous building research primarily focuses on energy efficiency and automation. While traditional artificial intelligence has advanced autonomous building research, it often relies on predefined rules and struggles to adapt to complex, evolving building operations. Moreover, the centralized organizational structures of facilities management hinder transparency in decision-making, limiting true building autonomy. Research on decentralized governance and adaptive building infrastructure, which could overcome these challenges, remains relatively unexplored. This paper addresses these limitations by introducing a novel Decentralized Autonomous Building Cyber-Physical System framework that integrates Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, Large Language Models, and digital twins to create a smart, self-managed, operational, and financially autonomous building infrastructure. This study develops a full-stack decentralized application to facilitate decentralized governance of building infrastructure. An LLM-based artificial intelligence assistant is developed to provide intuitive human-building interaction for blockchain and building operation management-related tasks and enable autonomous building operation. Six real-world scenarios were tested to evaluate the autonomous building system's workability, including building revenue and expense management, AI-assisted facility control, and autonomous adjustment of building systems. Results indicate that the prototype successfully executes these operations, confirming the framework's suitability for developing building infrastructure with decentralized governance and autonomous operation.
Set up your smart speaker for emergencies
Sarah Ferman Baker of Texas recently participated in Amazon Prime Day without her husband's knowledge. Watch the pure panic on husband Jamie Baker's face when he counts 17 delivery boxes on his front porch! Smart speakers tell you the weather, play music, answer trivia questions, help you prank your spouse (more on that at the end), and they just might save your life one day. Make sure you know these commands to get help in an emergency by heart. Let's start with the most popular They won't reliably report your location and don't offer a callback number, so they don't meet the standard requirements.
AI driven health recommender
Vignesh, K., Pranavi, B., Sreenidhi, Ch.
As AI emerged as highest valued technology, We used that to create a web application that makes a patient work easier .It detects the disease name based on the symptoms given by the patient and recommends medication for respective disease, precautions to take, diet to follow and workouts to do, so the disease can be minimized. The web application is made with clean and Realtime data by using Machine learning as root. We used flask to create a user-friendly platform.
Optimizing Travel Itineraries with AI Algorithms in a Microservices Architecture: Balancing Cost, Time, Preferences, and Sustainability
Barua, Biman, Kaiser, M. Shamim
The objective of this research is how an implementation of AI algorithms in the microservices architecture enhances travel itineraries by cost, time, user preferences, and environmental sustainability. It uses machine learning models for both cost forecasting and personalization, genetic algorithm for optimization of the itinerary, and heuristics for sustainability checking. Primary evaluated parameters consist of latency, ability to satisfy user preferences, cost and environmental concern. The experimental results demonstrate an average of 4.5 seconds of response time on 1000 concurrent users and 92% of user preferences accuracy. The cost efficiency is proved, with 95% of provided trips being within the limits of the budget declared by the user. The system also implements some measures to alleviate negative externalities related to travel and 60% of offered travel plans had green options incorporated, resulting in the average 15% lower carbon emissions than the traditional travel plans offered. The genetic algorithm with time complexity O(g.p.f) provides the optimal solution in 100 generations. Every iteration improves the quality of the solution by 5%, thus enabling its effective use in optimization problems where time is measured in seconds. Finally, the system is designed to be fault-tolerant with functional 99.9% availability which allows the provision of services even when requirements are exceeded. Travel optimization platform is turned dynamic and efficient by this microservices based architecture which provides enhanced scaling, allows asynchronous communication and real time changes. Because of the incorporation of Ai, cost control and eco-friendliness approaches, the system addresses the different user needs in the present days travel business.
FairDgcl: Fairness-aware Recommendation with Dynamic Graph Contrastive Learning
Chen, Wei, Yuan, Meng, Zhang, Zhao, Xie, Ruobing, Zhuang, Fuzhen, Wang, Deqing, Liu, Rui
As trustworthy AI continues to advance, the fairness issue in recommendations has received increasing attention. A recommender system is considered unfair when it produces unequal outcomes for different user groups based on user-sensitive attributes (e.g., age, gender). Some researchers have proposed data augmentation-based methods aiming at alleviating user-level unfairness by altering the skewed distribution of training data among various user groups. Despite yielding promising results, they often rely on fairness-related assumptions that may not align with reality, potentially reducing the data quality and negatively affecting model effectiveness. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we study how to implement high-quality data augmentation to improve recommendation fairness. Specifically, we propose FairDgcl, a dynamic graph adversarial contrastive learning framework aiming at improving fairness in recommender system. First, FairDgcl develops an adversarial contrastive network with a view generator and a view discriminator to learn generating fair augmentation strategies in an adversarial style. Then, we propose two dynamic, learnable models to generate contrastive views within contrastive learning framework, which automatically fine-tune the augmentation strategies. Meanwhile, we theoretically show that FairDgcl can simultaneously generate enhanced representations that possess both fairness and accuracy. Lastly, comprehensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FairDgcl.