Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Personal Assistant Systems


De-centering the (Traditional) User: Multistakeholder Evaluation of Recommender Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Expanding the frame of evaluation to include other parties, as well as the ecosystem in which the system is deployed, leads us to a multistakeholder view of recommender system evaluation as defined in [2]: "A multistakeholder evaluation is one in which the quality of recommendations is assessed across multiple groups of stakeholders." In this article, we provide (i) an overview of the types of recommendation stakeholders that can be considered in conducting such evaluations, (ii) a discussion of the considerations and values that enter into developing measures that capture outcomes of interest for a diversity of stakeholders, (iii) an outline of a methodology for developing and applying multistakeholder evaluation, and (iv) three examples of different multistakeholder scenarios including derivations of evaluation metrics for different stakeholder groups in these different scenarios. The variety of possible stakeholders we identified that are part of the general recommendation ecosystem is suggested in Figure 1 and defined here, using the terminology from [1, 2]: Recommendation consumers are the traditional recommender system users to whom recommendations are delivered and to which typical forms of recommender system evaluation are oriented. Item providers form the general class of individuals or entities who create or otherwise stand behind the items being recommended.


Your Next AI Wearable Will Listen to Everything All the Time

WIRED

I spent an entire day of CES wearing a little yellow bracelet. To the unsuspecting nearby humans, it probably looked like a fitness tracker. But the whole time, this yellow Pioneer wearable from Bee AI recorded everything around me. It wasn't storing audio like a typical recorder app, but it processed my conversations, then gave me personalized to-do lists and readable summaries of my in-person chats. A few days before the trade show, I spoke with the founder of another new company, Omi, which was officially unveiled for the first time today. Record everything around you to create an activity log, and then have AI disseminate the information to give you actionable insights and tasks from your day, almost like a personal assistant.


Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Graphs (GraphRAG)

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique that enhances downstream task execution by retrieving additional information, such as knowledge, skills, and tools from external sources. Graph, by its intrinsic "nodes connected by edges" nature, encodes massive heterogeneous and relational information, making it a golden resource for RAG in tremendous real-world applications. As a result, we have recently witnessed increasing attention on equipping RAG with Graph, i.e., GraphRAG. However, unlike conventional RAG, where the retriever, generator, and external data sources can be uniformly designed in the neural-embedding space, the uniqueness of graph-structured data, such as diverse-formatted and domain-specific relational knowledge, poses unique and significant challenges when designing GraphRAG for different domains. Given the broad applicability, the associated design challenges, and the recent surge in GraphRAG, a systematic and up-to-date survey of its key concepts and techniques is urgently desired. Following this motivation, we present a comprehensive and up-to-date survey on GraphRAG. Our survey first proposes a holistic GraphRAG framework by defining its key components, including query processor, retriever, organizer, generator, and data source. Furthermore, recognizing that graphs in different domains exhibit distinct relational patterns and require dedicated designs, we review GraphRAG techniques uniquely tailored to each domain. Finally, we discuss research challenges and brainstorm directions to inspire cross-disciplinary opportunities.


Rethinking Byzantine Robustness in Federated Recommendation from Sparse Aggregation Perspective

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

To preserve user privacy in recommender systems, federated recommendation (FR) based on federated learning (FL) emerges, keeping the personal data on the local client and updating a model collaboratively. Unlike FL, FR has a unique sparse aggregation mechanism, where the embedding of each item is updated by only partial clients, instead of full clients in a dense aggregation of general FL. Recently, as an essential principle of FL, model security has received increasing attention, especially for Byzantine attacks, where malicious clients can send arbitrary updates. The problem of exploring the Byzantine robustness of FR is particularly critical since in the domains applying FR, e.g., e-commerce, malicious clients can be injected easily by registering new accounts. However, existing Byzantine works neglect the unique sparse aggregation of FR, making them unsuitable for our problem. Thus, we make the first effort to investigate Byzantine attacks on FR from the perspective of sparse aggregation, which is non-trivial: it is not clear how to define Byzantine robustness under sparse aggregations and design Byzantine attacks under limited knowledge/capability. In this paper, we reformulate the Byzantine robustness under sparse aggregation by defining the aggregation for a single item as the smallest execution unit. Then we propose a family of effective attack strategies, named Spattack, which exploit the vulnerability in sparse aggregation and are categorized along the adversary's knowledge and capability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Spattack can effectively prevent convergence and even break down defenses under a few malicious clients, raising alarms for securing FR systems.


The Future of AI: Exploring the Potential of Large Concept Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to drive transformative innovations, with significant progress in conversational interfaces, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent content creation. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the rise of Generative AI has marked a pivotal era, with the term Large Language Models (LLMs) becoming a ubiquitous part of daily life. LLMs have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in tasks such as text summarization, code generation, and creative writing. However, these models are inherently limited by their token-level processing, which restricts their ability to perform abstract reasoning, conceptual understanding, and efficient generation of long-form content. To address these limitations, Meta has introduced Large Concept Models (LCMs), representing a significant shift from traditional token-based frameworks. LCMs use concepts as foundational units of understanding, enabling more sophisticated semantic reasoning and context-aware decision-making. Given the limited academic research on this emerging technology, our study aims to bridge the knowledge gap by collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing existing grey literature to provide a comprehensive understanding of LCMs. Specifically, we (i) identify and describe the features that distinguish LCMs from LLMs, (ii) explore potential applications of LCMs across multiple domains, and (iii) propose future research directions and practical strategies to advance LCM development and adoption.


Efficient and Responsible Adaptation of Large Language Models for Robust and Equitable Top-k Recommendations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Conventional recommendation systems (RSs) are typically optimized to enhance performance metrics uniformly across all training samples, inadvertently overlooking the needs of diverse user populations. The performance disparity among various populations can harm the model's robustness to sub-populations due to the varying user properties. While large language models (LLMs) show promise in enhancing RS performance, their practical applicability is hindered by high costs, inference latency, and degraded performance on long user queries. To address these challenges, we propose a hybrid task allocation framework designed to promote social good by equitably serving all user groups. By adopting a two-phase approach, we promote a strategic assignment of tasks for efficient and responsible adaptation of LLMs. Our strategy works by first identifying the weak and inactive users that receive a suboptimal ranking performance by RSs. Next, we use an in-context learning approach for such users, wherein each user interaction history is contextualized as a distinct ranking task. We evaluate our hybrid framework by incorporating eight different recommendation algorithms and three different LLMs -- both open and close-sourced. Our results on three real-world datasets show a significant reduction in weak users and improved robustness to subpopulations without disproportionately escalating costs.


Reolink unveils Altas Wireless Security System with 24/7 2K recording

PCWorld

Reolink has unveiled the Altas Wireless Security System, a battery-powered camera setup capable of delivering 24/7 recording in 2K resolution. Designed with flexibility and ease of use in mind, the system targets homeowners who want reliable surveillance without technical headaches. Unveiled this week at CES in Las Vegas, the Altas Wireless Security System includes two 2K bullet-style Altas cameras, two 6-watt solar panels, and a Home Hub for centralized management. Each camera features a 20,000mAh battery, providing up to seven days of continuous recording. With just two hours of sunlight daily, the solar panels keep the cameras running around the clock, reducing reliance on motion detection.


Swiping in Japan: how Gen Z is changing the dating app game

The Japan Times

One day in October, 26-year-old Seokjin decided to download Tapple, a popular dating app in Japan. The business consultant, who asked to go by his first name for privacy reasons, said that he wanted someone he could lean on after starting his first job in April and feeling overworked. "Around August and September I was constantly thinking, why do I have to work so much?" he says. "I wanted my life to have more of a purpose and have someone that I could spend it with and go on trips with, someone who would be on my team when things were rough -- that's why I started using the app."


A Survey on Federated Learning in Human Sensing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Human Sensing, a field that leverages technology to monitor human activities, psycho-physiological states, and interactions with the environment, enhances our understanding of human behavior and drives the development of advanced services that improve overall quality of life. However, its reliance on detailed and often privacy-sensitive data as the basis for its machine learning (ML) models raises significant legal and ethical concerns. The recently proposed ML approach of Federated Learning (FL) promises to alleviate many of these concerns, as it is able to create accurate ML models without sending raw user data to a central server. While FL has demonstrated its usefulness across a variety of areas, such as text prediction and cyber security, its benefits in Human Sensing are under-explored, given the particular challenges in this domain. This survey conducts a comprehensive analysis of the current state-of-the-art studies on FL in Human Sensing, and proposes a taxonomy and an eight-dimensional assessment for FL approaches. Through the eight-dimensional assessment, we then evaluate whether the surveyed studies consider a specific FL-in-Human-Sensing challenge or not. Finally, based on the overall analysis, we discuss open challenges and highlight five research aspects related to FL in Human Sensing that require urgent research attention. Our work provides a comprehensive corpus of FL studies and aims to assist FL practitioners in developing and evaluating solutions that effectively address the real-world complexities of Human Sensing.


InterFormer: Towards Effective Heterogeneous Interaction Learning for Click-Through Rate Prediction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction, which predicts the probability of a user clicking an ad, is a fundamental task in recommender systems. The emergence of heterogeneous information, such as user profile and behavior sequences, depicts user interests from different aspects. A mutually beneficial integration of heterogeneous information is the cornerstone towards the success of CTR prediction. However, most of the existing methods suffer from two fundamental limitations, including (1) insufficient inter-mode interaction due to the unidirectional information flow between modes, and (2) aggressive information aggregation caused by early summarization, resulting in excessive information loss. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel module named InterFormer to learn heterogeneous information interaction in an interleaving style. To achieve better interaction learning, InterFormer enables bidirectional information flow for mutually beneficial learning across different modes. To avoid aggressive information aggregation, we retain complete information in each data mode and use a separate bridging arch for effective information selection and summarization. Our proposed InterFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets and a large-scale industrial dataset.