Personal Assistant Systems
A SWAT team stormed my house
February 16th started like any typical Friday night. My husband and I decided to stay home, grill chicken and make a salad for dinner. At about 6:45 p.m., we heard some loud rumbling overhead. We walked onto the back patio, and two police helicopters were overhead -- shining lights all over our property, and a recording echoed, "Police. As I looked across the fence, a swarm of armed members of the Phoenix SWAT Team with a few dogs were circling our property. One of the guys said, "Yeah, there's a jammer right here." I leaned over the patio and asked, "What's going on?" A SWAT member said, "Ma'am, A South American gang is targeting homes to steal from.
Amazon Echo Hub Review: Bare-Bones Smart Display
I've been testing and writing about smart displays since they first launched, a screen slapped onto the ever-growing world of smart speakers. Since the introduction of the massive Echo Show in 2017, Amazon's displays have consistently felt a little bulky and overstuffed, trying to be too many things at once, with design taking more of a backseat. Instead of a classic smart display with a large speaker, it's a wall-mounted display designed for controlling your smart home. The design is reminiscent of a home security system panel or a control panel for a custom smart-home system like Control4--but also looks unsurprisingly similar to an Echo Show, just without the speaker backing. The speaker isn't the only feature chopped off from the Echo Hub.
Compass: A Decentralized Scheduler for Latency-Sensitive ML Workflows
Yang, Yuting, Merlina, Andrea, Song, Weijia, Yuan, Tiancheng, Birman, Ken, Vitenberg, Roman
Yet We consider ML query processing in distributed systems intelligent edge applications differ from cloud microservices where GPU-enabled workers coordinate to execute complex in important ways, so we cannot just use the same techniques queries: a computing style often seen in applications that interact employed in web frameworks. Whereas the outer tiers of with users in support of image processing and natural today's cloud are dominated by lightweight, stateless, containerized language processing. In such systems, coscheduling of GPU applications that can be upscaled or downscaled memory management and task placement represents a promising at low cost, ML depends on large objects (hyperparameters, opportunity. We propose Compass, a novel framework model parameters, and supporting databases) and often entails that unifies these functions to reduce job latency while using hardware-accelerated computation using devices preconfigured resources efficiently, placing tasks where data dependencies with the proper firmware. When shifting a task to a will be satisfied, collocating tasks from the same job (when device that has not previously run it, computation cannot begin this will not overload the host or its GPU), and efficiently managing until all the prerequisites are in place. We can and do GPU memory. Comparison with other state of the art launch new ML instances when additional capacity is needed, schedulers shows a significant reduction in completion times but scheduling strategies must evolve to avoid thrashing.
Explainable Session-based Recommendation via Path Reasoning
Cao, Yang, Shang, Shuo, Wang, Jun, Zhang, Wei
This paper explores providing explainability for session-based recommendation (SR) by path reasoning. Current SR models emphasize accuracy but lack explainability, while traditional path reasoning prioritizes knowledge graph exploration, ignoring sequential patterns present in the session history. Therefore, we propose a generalized hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for SR, which improves the explainability of existing SR models via Path Reasoning, namely PR4SR. Considering the different importance of items to the session, we design the session-level agent to select the items in the session as the starting point for path reasoning and the path-level agent to perform path reasoning. In particular, we design a multi-target reward mechanism to adapt to the skip behaviors of sequential patterns in SR, and introduce path midpoint reward to enhance the exploration efficiency in knowledge graphs. To improve the completeness of the knowledge graph and to diversify the paths of explanation, we incorporate extracted feature information from images into the knowledge graph. We instantiate PR4SR in five state-of-the-art SR models (i.e., GRU4REC, NARM, GCSAN, SR-GNN, SASRec) and compare it with other explainable SR frameworks, to demonstrate the effectiveness of PR4SR for recommendation and explanation tasks through extensive experiments with these approaches on four datasets.
Does Negative Sampling Matter? A Review with Insights into its Theory and Applications
Yang, Zhen, Ding, Ming, Huang, Tinglin, Cen, Yukuo, Song, Junshuai, Xu, Bin, Dong, Yuxiao, Tang, Jie
Negative sampling has swiftly risen to prominence as a focal point of research, with wide-ranging applications spanning machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, data mining, and recommender systems. This growing interest raises several critical questions: Does negative sampling really matter? Is there a general framework that can incorporate all existing negative sampling methods? In what fields is it applied? Addressing these questions, we propose a general framework that leverages negative sampling. Delving into the history of negative sampling, we trace the development of negative sampling through five evolutionary paths. We dissect and categorize the strategies used to select negative sample candidates, detailing global, local, mini-batch, hop, and memory-based approaches. Our review categorizes current negative sampling methods into five types: static, hard, GAN-based, Auxiliary-based, and In-batch methods, providing a clear structure for understanding negative sampling. Beyond detailed categorization, we highlight the application of negative sampling in various areas, offering insights into its practical benefits. Finally, we briefly discuss open problems and future directions for negative sampling.
A Review of Data Mining in Personalized Education: Current Trends and Future Prospects
Xiong, Zhang, Li, Haoxuan, Liu, Zhuang, Chen, Zhuofan, Zhou, Hao, Rong, Wenge, Ouyang, Yuanxin
Personalized education, tailored to individual student needs, leverages educational technology and artificial intelligence (AI) in the digital age to enhance learning effectiveness. The integration of AI in educational platforms provides insights into academic performance, learning preferences, and behaviors, optimizing the personal learning process. Driven by data mining techniques, it not only benefits students but also provides educators and institutions with tools to craft customized learning experiences. To offer a comprehensive review of recent advancements in personalized educational data mining, this paper focuses on four primary scenarios: educational recommendation, cognitive diagnosis, knowledge tracing, and learning analysis. This paper presents a structured taxonomy for each area, compiles commonly used datasets, and identifies future research directions, emphasizing the role of data mining in enhancing personalized education and paving the way for future exploration and innovation.
Doubly Calibrated Estimator for Recommendation on Data Missing Not At Random
Recommender systems often suffer from selection bias as users tend to rate their preferred items. The datasets collected under such conditions exhibit entries missing not at random and thus are not randomized-controlled trials representing the target population. To address this challenge, a doubly robust estimator and its enhanced variants have been proposed as they ensure unbiasedness when accurate imputed errors or predicted propensities are provided. However, we argue that existing estimators rely on miscalibrated imputed errors and propensity scores as they depend on rudimentary models for estimation. We provide theoretical insights into how miscalibrated imputation and propensity models may limit the effectiveness of doubly robust estimators and validate our theorems using real-world datasets. On this basis, we propose a Doubly Calibrated Estimator that involves the calibration of both the imputation and propensity models. To achieve this, we introduce calibration experts that consider different logit distributions across users. Moreover, we devise a tri-level joint learning framework, allowing the simultaneous optimization of calibration experts alongside prediction and imputation models. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of the Doubly Calibrated Estimator in the context of debiased recommendation tasks.
Federated Contextual Cascading Bandits with Asynchronous Communication and Heterogeneous Users
Yang, Hantao, Liu, Xutong, Wang, Zhiyong, Xie, Hong, Lui, John C. S., Lian, Defu, Chen, Enhong
We study the problem of federated contextual combinatorial cascading bandits, where $|\mathcal{U}|$ agents collaborate under the coordination of a central server to provide tailored recommendations to the $|\mathcal{U}|$ corresponding users. Existing works consider either a synchronous framework, necessitating full agent participation and global synchronization, or assume user homogeneity with identical behaviors. We overcome these limitations by considering (1) federated agents operating in an asynchronous communication paradigm, where no mandatory synchronization is required and all agents communicate independently with the server, (2) heterogeneous user behaviors, where users can be stratified into $J \le |\mathcal{U}|$ latent user clusters, each exhibiting distinct preferences. For this setting, we propose a UCB-type algorithm with delicate communication protocols. Through theoretical analysis, we give sub-linear regret bounds on par with those achieved in the synchronous framework, while incurring only logarithmic communication costs. Empirical evaluation on synthetic and real-world datasets validates our algorithm's superior performance in terms of regrets and communication costs.
Text Understanding and Generation Using Transformer Models for Intelligent E-commerce Recommendations
Xiang, Yafei, Yu, Hanyi, Gong, Yulu, Huo, Shuning, Zhu, Mengran
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, Transformer structural pre-training model has become an important tool for large language model (LLM) tasks. In the field of e-commerce, these models are especially widely used, from text understanding to generating recommendation systems, which provide powerful technical support for improving user experience and optimizing service processes. This paper reviews the core application scenarios of Transformer pre-training model in e-commerce text understanding and recommendation generation, including but not limited to automatic generation of product descriptions, sentiment analysis of user comments, construction of personalized recommendation system and automated processing of customer service conversations. Through a detailed analysis of the model's working principle, implementation process, and application effects in specific cases, this paper emphasizes the unique advantages of pre-trained models in understanding complex user intentions and improving the quality of recommendations. In addition, the challenges and improvement directions for the future are also discussed, such as how to further improve the generalization ability of the model, the ability to handle large-scale data sets, and technical strategies to protect user privacy. Ultimately, the paper points out that the application of Transformer structural pre-training models in e-commerce has not only driven technological innovation, but also brought substantial benefits to merchants and consumers, and looking forward, these models will continue to play a key role in e-commerce and beyond.
Against Filter Bubbles: Diversified Music Recommendation via Weighted Hypergraph Embedding Learning
Luo, Chaoguang, Wen, Liuying, Qin, Yong, Yang, Liangwei, Hu, Zhineng, Yu, Philip S.
Recommender systems serve a dual purpose for users: sifting out inappropriate or mismatched information while accurately identifying items that align with their preferences. Numerous recommendation algorithms are designed to provide users with a personalized array of information tailored to their preferences. Nevertheless, excessive personalization can confine users within a "filter bubble". Consequently, achieving the right balance between accuracy and diversity in recommendations is a pressing concern. To address this challenge, exemplified by music recommendation, we introduce the Diversified Weighted Hypergraph music Recommendation algorithm (DWHRec). In the DWHRec algorithm, the initial connections between users and listened tracks are represented by a weighted hypergraph. Simultaneously, associations between artists, albums and tags with tracks are also appended to the hypergraph. To explore users' latent preferences, a hypergraph-based random walk embedding method is applied to the constructed hypergraph. In our investigation, accuracy is gauged by the alignment between the user and the track, whereas the array of recommended track types measures diversity. We rigorously compared DWHRec against seven state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms using two real-world music datasets. The experimental results validate DWHRec as a solution that adeptly harmonizes accuracy and diversity, delivering a more enriched musical experience. Beyond music recommendation, DWHRec can be extended to cater to other scenarios with similar data structures.