Personal Assistant Systems
Learning to Retrieve for Job Matching
Shen, Jianqiang, Juan, Yuchin, Zhang, Shaobo, Liu, Ping, Pu, Wen, Vasudevan, Sriram, Song, Qingquan, Borisyuk, Fedor, Shen, Kay Qianqi, Wei, Haichao, Ren, Yunxiang, Chiou, Yeou S., Kuang, Sicong, Yin, Yuan, Zheng, Ben, Wu, Muchen, Gharghabi, Shaghayegh, Wang, Xiaoqing, Xue, Huichao, Guo, Qi, Hewlett, Daniel, Simon, Luke, Hong, Liangjie, Zhang, Wenjing
Web-scale search systems typically tackle the scalability challenge As one of the largest professional networking platforms globally, with a two-step paradigm: retrieval and ranking. The retrieval step, LinkedIn is a hub for job seekers and recruiters, with 65M+ job also known as candidate selection, often involves extracting standardized seekers utilizing the search and recommendation services weekly entities, creating an inverted index, and performing term to discover millions of open job listings. To enable realtime personalization matching for retrieval. Such traditional methods require manual for job seekers, we adopted the classic two-stage paradigm and time-consuming development of query models. In this paper, of retrieval and ranking to tackle the scalability challenge. The retrieval we discuss applying learning-to-retrieve technology to enhance layer, also known as candidate selection, chooses a small set LinkedIn's job search and recommendation systems. In the realm of of relevant jobs from the set of all jobs, after which the ranking layer promoted jobs, the key objective is to improve the quality of applicants, performs a more computationally expensive second-pass scoring thereby delivering value to recruiter customers. To achieve and sorting of the resulting candidate set. This paper focuses on this, we leverage confirmed hire data to construct a graph that improving the methodology and systems for retrieval.
RecMind: Japanese Movie Recommendation Dialogue with Seeker's Internal State
Kodama, Takashi, Kiyomaru, Hirokazu, Huang, Yin Jou, Kurohashi, Sadao
Humans pay careful attention to the interlocutor's internal state in dialogues. For example, in recommendation dialogues, we make recommendations while estimating the seeker's internal state, such as his/her level of knowledge and interest. Since there are no existing annotated resources for the analysis, we constructed RecMind, a Japanese movie recommendation dialogue dataset with annotations of the seeker's internal state at the entity level. Each entity has a subjective label annotated by the seeker and an objective label annotated by the recommender. RecMind also features engaging dialogues with long seeker's utterances, enabling a detailed analysis of the seeker's internal state. Our analysis based on RecMind reveals that entities that the seeker has no knowledge about but has an interest in contribute to recommendation success. We also propose a response generation framework that explicitly considers the seeker's internal state, utilizing the chain-of-thought prompting. The human evaluation results show that our proposed method outperforms the baseline method in both consistency and the success of recommendations.
Beyond Voice Assistants: Exploring Advantages and Risks of an In-Car Social Robot in Real Driving Scenarios
Li, Yuanchao, Urquhart, Lachlan, Karatas, Nihan, Shao, Shun, Ishiguro, Hiroshi, Shen, Xun
In-car Voice Assistants (VAs) play an increasingly critical role in automotive user interface design. However, existing VAs primarily perform simple 'query-answer' tasks, limiting their ability to sustain drivers' long-term attention. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of an in-car Robot Assistant (RA) that offers functionalities beyond voice interaction. We aim to answer the question: How does the presence of a social robot impact user experience in real driving scenarios? Our study begins with a user survey to understand perspectives on in-car VAs and their influence on driving experiences. We then conduct non-driving and on-road experiments with selected participants to assess user experiences with an RA. Additionally, we conduct subjective ratings to evaluate user perceptions of the RA's personality, which is crucial for robot design. We also explore potential concerns regarding ethical risks. Finally, we provide a comprehensive discussion and recommendations for the future development of in-car RAs.
7 things you should never ask Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. You're suddenly thrown into a situation where you must perform CPR to save a life. Oh, no -- you don't remember anything from that course 15 years ago. You might think a quick "Hey, Siri" would pull up the instructions quickly and clearly, but that's absolutely the worst thing to do.
Tinder, Hinge 'deliberately' turn users into swiping addicts, lawsuit says
In the book "Ethics in Design and Communication: Critical Perspectives," designer and researcher Sarah Edmands Martin wrote that Tinder's design, which presents users with profile cards of potential matches stacked on top of one another, means users "are urged onward" to the next profile "peeking from below the current card, subtly pressuring a user to move on."
Amazon's Echo speaker falls to 55 in Presidents' Day sale
Amazon is ringing in Presidents' Day with big sales on its Echo devices, including its fourth-generation Amazon Echo. The smart speaker is currently down to 55 from 100 -- a 45 percent discount. Though released in 2020, Amazon's 4th-gen Echo is still its latest iteration and has held its weight over the years. We even named it 2024's best smart speaker under 100. So, what makes the 4th-gen Amazon Echo so great?
Talk Through It: End User Directed Manipulation Learning
Winge, Carl, Imdieke, Adam, Aldeeb, Bahaa, Kang, Dongyeop, Desingh, Karthik
Training generalist robot agents is an immensely difficult feat due to the requirement to perform a huge range of tasks in many different environments. We propose selectively training robots based on end-user preferences instead. Given a factory model that lets an end user instruct a robot to perform lower-level actions (e.g. 'Move left'), we show that end users can collect demonstrations using language to train their home model for higher-level tasks specific to their needs (e.g. 'Open the top drawer and put the block inside'). We demonstrate this hierarchical robot learning framework on robot manipulation tasks using RLBench environments. Our method results in a 16% improvement in skill success rates compared to a baseline method. In further experiments, we explore the use of the large vision-language model (VLM), Bard, to automatically break down tasks into sequences of lower-level instructions, aiming to bypass end-user involvement. The VLM is unable to break tasks down to our lowest level, but does achieve good results breaking high-level tasks into mid-level skills. We have a supplemental video and additional results at talk-through-it.github.io.
Mini-Hes: A Parallelizable Second-order Latent Factor Analysis Model
Wang, Jialiang, Li, Weiling, Zhong, Yurong, Luo, Xin
Interactions among large number of entities is naturally high-dimensional and incomplete (HDI) in many big data related tasks. Behavioral characteristics of users are hidden in these interactions, hence, effective representation of the HDI data is a fundamental task for understanding user behaviors. Latent factor analysis (LFA) model has proven to be effective in representing HDI data. The performance of an LFA model relies heavily on its training process, which is a non-convex optimization. It has been proven that incorporating local curvature and preprocessing gradients during its training process can lead to superior performance compared to LFA models built with first-order family methods. However, with the escalation of data volume, the feasibility of second-order algorithms encounters challenges. To address this pivotal issue, this paper proposes a mini-block diagonal hessian-free (Mini-Hes) optimization for building an LFA model. It leverages the dominant diagonal blocks in the generalized Gauss-Newton matrix based on the analysis of the Hessian matrix of LFA model and serves as an intermediary strategy bridging the gap between first-order and second-order optimization methods. Experiment results indicate that, with Mini-Hes, the LFA model outperforms several state-of-the-art models in addressing missing data estimation task on multiple real HDI datasets from recommender system. (The source code of Mini-Hes is available at https://github.com/Goallow/Mini-Hes)
Are dating apps fuelling addiction? Lawsuit against Tinder, Hinge and Match claims so
Many of us have had bad experiences of being swiped left, ghosted, breadcrumbed and benched on internet dating apps – though few people have ever thought to take their heartbreak to court. On Valentine's Day, six dating app users filed a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing Tinder, Hinge and other Match dating apps of using addictive, game-like features to encourage compulsive use. Match's apps, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in the Northern District of California, "employ recognised dopamine-manipulating product features" to turn users into "gamblers locked in a search for psychological rewards", generating "market success by fomenting dating app addiction that drives expensive subscriptions and perpetual use". Match said the lawsuit was "ridiculous", but online dating experts said it reflected a broader backlash to the way apps were gamifying human experience for profit and leaving people feeling manipulated. "I'm not at all surprised that this has come to litigation. I think big tech is the new big tobacco, as smartphones are just as addictive as cigarettes," said Mia Levitin, author of The Future of Seduction.
Lawsuit against Tinder, Hinge and Match alleges dating apps encourage 'compulsive' behavior and 'lock users into a perpetual pay-to-play loop'
Dating apps are supposedly'designed to be deleted,' but a new class action lawsuit claims the apps are instead'designed to be addictive.' The lawsuit, filed on Valentine's Day against Match Group which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish, accused the company of using'psychological manipulation' like push notifications, rewards, and punishments to guarantee users keep swiping right. The app is designed to turn users into'addicts' who are enticed by the game-like play-to-play loop, the lawsuit claimed, accusing Match Group of prioritizing profit over promises to help users find love. Match sells subscription plans to remove like limits and see who likes you with Tinder offering its Gold package for 140 for six months or 40 for one month and its Platinum package for 50 per month or 180 for six months. The lawsuit claims that if users were content with the basic app features, they wouldn't need to purchase the additional subscription when they reach their'like limit.'