Within the domain of short video recommendation, predicting users' watch time is a critical but challenging task. Prevailing deterministic solutions obtain accurate debiased statistical models, yet they neglect the intrinsic uncertainty inherent in user environments. In our observation, we found that this uncertainty could potentially limit these methods' accuracy in watch-time prediction on our online platform, despite that we have employed numerous features and complex network architectures. Consequently, we believe that a better solution is to model the conditional distribution of this uncertain watch time. In this paper, we introduce a novel estimation technique -- Conditional Quantile Estimation (CQE), which utilizes quantile regression to capture the nuanced distribution of watch time. The learned distribution accounts for the stochastic nature of users, thereby it provides a more accurate and robust estimation. In addition, we also design several strategies to enhance the quantile prediction including conditional expectation, conservative estimation, and dynamic quantile combination. We verify the effectiveness of our method through extensive offline evaluations using public datasets as well as deployment in a real-world video application with over 300 million daily active users.

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Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) improves recommendation performance by utilizing information from multiple domains, which contrasts with Single-Domain Sequential Recommendation (SDSR) that relies on a historical interaction within a specific domain. However, CDSR may underperform compared to the SDSR approach in certain domains due to negative transfer, which occurs when there is a lack of relation between domains or different levels of data sparsity. To address the issue of negative transfer, our proposed CDSR model estimates the degree of negative transfer of each domain and adaptively assigns it as a weight factor to the prediction loss, to control gradient flows through domains with significant negative transfer. To this end, our model compares the performance of a model trained on multiple domains (CDSR) with a model trained solely on the specific domain (SDSR) to evaluate the negative transfer of each domain using our asymmetric cooperative network. In addition, to facilitate the transfer of valuable cues between the SDSR and CDSR tasks, we developed an auxiliary loss that maximizes the mutual information between the representation pairs from both tasks on a per-domain basis. This cooperative learning between SDSR and CDSR tasks is similar to the collaborative dynamics between pacers and runners in a marathon. Our model outperformed numerous previous works in extensive experiments on two real-world industrial datasets across ten service domains. We also have deployed our model in the recommendation system of our personal assistant app service, resulting in 21.4% increase in click-through rate compared to existing models, which is valuable to real-world business.

The modeling of users' behaviors is crucial in modern recommendation systems. A lot of research focuses on modeling users' lifelong sequences, which can be extremely long and sometimes exceed thousands of items. These models use the target item to search for the most relevant items from the historical sequence. However, training lifelong sequences in click through rate (CTR) prediction or personalized search ranking (PSR) is extremely difficult due to the insufficient learning problem of ID embedding, especially when the IDs in the lifelong sequence features do not exist in the samples of training dataset. Additionally, existing target attention mechanisms struggle to learn the multi-modal representations of items in the sequence well. The distribution of multi-modal embedding (text, image and attributes) output of user's interacted items are not properly aligned and there exist divergence across modalities. We also observe that users' search query sequences and item browsing sequences can fully depict users' intents and benefit from each other. To address these challenges, we propose a unified lifelong multi-modal sequence model called SEMINAR-Search Enhanced Multi-Modal Interest Network and Approximate Retrieval. Specifically, a network called Pretraining Search Unit (PSU) learns the lifelong sequences of multi-modal query-item pairs in a pretraining-finetuning manner with multiple objectives: multi-modal alignment, next query-item pair prediction, query-item relevance prediction, etc. After pretraining, the downstream model restores the pretrained embedding as initialization and finetunes the network. To accelerate the online retrieval speed of multi-modal embedding, we propose a multi-modal codebook-based product quantization strategy to approximate the exact attention calculati

With rapid advances in machine learning, many people in the field have been discussing the rise of digital minds and the possibility of artificial sentience. Future developments in AI capabilities and safety will depend on public opinion and human-AI interaction. To begin to fill this research gap, we present the first nationally representative survey data on the topic of sentient AI: initial results from the Artificial Intelligence, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) survey, a preregistered and longitudinal study of U.S. public opinion that began in 2021. Across one wave of data collection in 2021 and two in 2023 (total N = 3,500), we found mind perception and moral concern for AI well-being in 2021 were higher than predicted and significantly increased in 2023: for example, 71% agree sentient AI deserve to be treated with respect, and 38% support legal rights. People have become more threatened by AI, and there is widespread opposition to new technologies: 63% support a ban on smarter-than-human AI, and 69% support a ban on sentient AI. Expected timelines are surprisingly short and shortening with a median forecast of sentient AI in only five years and artificial general intelligence in only two years. We argue that, whether or not AIs become sentient, the discussion itself may overhaul human-computer interaction and shape the future trajectory of AI technologies, including existential risks and opportunities.

This paper aims to address the challenge of sparse and missing data in recommendation systems, a significant hurdle in the age of big data. Traditional imputation methods struggle to capture complex relationships within the data. We propose a novel approach that fine-tune Large Language Model (LLM) and use it impute missing data for recommendation systems. LLM which is trained on vast amounts of text, is able to understand complex relationship among data and intelligently fill in missing information. This enriched data is then used by the recommendation system to generate more accurate and personalized suggestions, ultimately enhancing the user experience. We evaluate our LLM-based imputation method across various tasks within the recommendation system domain, including single classification, multi-classification, and regression compared to traditional data imputation methods. By demonstrating the superiority of LLM imputation over traditional methods, we establish its potential for improving recommendation system performance.

User activities can influence their subsequent interactions with a post, generating interest in the user. Typically, users interact with posts from friends by commenting and using reaction emojis, reflecting their level of interest on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Our objective is to analyze user history over time, including their posts and engagement on various topics. Additionally, we take into account the user's profile, seeking connections between their activities and social media platforms. By integrating user history, engagement, and persona, we aim to assess recommendation scores based on relevant item sharing by Hit Rate (HR) and the quality of the ranking system by Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), where we achieve the highest for NeuMF 0.80 and 0.6 respectively. Our hybrid approach solves the cold-start problem when there is a new user, for new items cold-start problem will never occur, as we consider the post category values. To improve the performance of the model during cold-start we introduce collaborative filtering by looking for similar users and ranking the users based on the highest similarity scores.

Pre-trained models learn general representations from large datsets which can be fine-turned for specific tasks to significantly reduce training time. Pre-trained models like generative pretrained transformers (GPT), bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), vision transfomers (ViT) have become a cornerstone of current research in machine learning. This study proposes a multi-modal movie recommendation system by extract features of the well designed posters for each movie and the narrative text description of the movie. This system uses the BERT model to extract the information of text modality, the ViT model applied to extract the information of poster/image modality, and the Transformer architecture for feature fusion of all modalities to predict users' preference. The integration of pre-trained foundational models with some smaller data sets in downstream applications capture multi-modal content features in a more comprehensive manner, thereby providing more accurate recommendations. The efficiency of the proof-of-concept model is verified by the standard benchmark problem the MovieLens 100K and 1M datasets. The prediction accuracy of user ratings is enhanced in comparison to the baseline algorithm, thereby demonstrating the potential of this cross-modal algorithm to be applied for movie or video recommendation.

In recent years, journalists have expressed concerns about the increasing trend of news article avoidance, especially within specific domains. This issue has been exacerbated by the rise of recommender systems. Our research indicates that recommender systems should consider avoidance as a fundamental factor. We argue that news articles can be characterized by three principal elements: exposure, relevance, and avoidance, all of which are closely interconnected. To address these challenges, we introduce AWRS, an Avoidance-Aware Recommender System. This framework incorporates avoidance awareness when recommending news, based on the premise that news article avoidance conveys significant information about user preferences. Evaluation results on three news datasets in different languages (English, Norwegian, and Japanese) demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches.

Self-supervised contrastive learning has become a key technique in deep learning, particularly in time series analysis, due to its ability to learn meaningful representations without explicit supervision. Augmentation is a critical component in contrastive learning, where different augmentations can dramatically impact performance, sometimes influencing accuracy by over 30%. However, the selection of augmentations is predominantly empirical which can be suboptimal, or grid searching that is time-consuming. In this paper, we establish a principled framework for selecting augmentations based on dataset characteristics such as trend and seasonality. Specifically, we construct 12 synthetic datasets incorporating trend, seasonality, and integration weights. We then evaluate the effectiveness of 8 different augmentations across these synthetic datasets, thereby inducing generalizable associations between time series characteristics and augmentation efficiency. Additionally, we evaluated the induced associations across 6 real-world datasets encompassing domains such as activity recognition, disease diagnosis, traffic monitoring, electricity usage, mechanical fault prognosis, and finance. These real-world datasets are diverse, covering a range from 1 to 12 channels, 2 to 10 classes, sequence lengths of 14 to 1280, and data frequencies from 250 Hz to daily intervals. The experimental results show that our proposed trend-seasonality-based augmentation recommendation algorithm can accurately identify the effective augmentations for a given time series dataset, achieving an average Recall@3 of 0.667, outperforming baselines. Our work provides guidance for studies employing contrastive learning in time series analysis, with wide-ranging applications. All the code, datasets, and analysis results will be released at https://github.com/DL4mHealth/TS-Contrastive-Augmentation-Recommendation.