Learning utility, or reward, models from pairwise comparisons is a fundamental component in a number of application domains. These approaches inherently entail collecting preference information from people, with feedback often provided anonymously. Since preferences are subjective, there is no gold standard to compare against; yet, reliance of high-impact systems on preference learning creates a strong motivation for malicious actors to skew data collected in this fashion to their ends. We investigate the nature and extent of this vulnerability systematically by considering a threat model in which an attacker can flip a small subset of preference comparisons with the goal of either promoting or demoting a target outcome. First, we propose two classes of algorithmic approaches for these attacks: a principled gradient-based framework, and several variants of rank-by-distance methods. Next, we demonstrate the efficacy of best attacks in both these classes in successfully achieving malicious goals on datasets from three diverse domains: autonomous control, recommendation system, and textual prompt-response preference learning. We find that the best attacks are often highly successful, achieving in the most extreme case 100% success rate with only 0.3% of the data poisoned. However, which attack is best can vary significantly across domains, demonstrating the value of our comprehensive vulnerability analysis that involves several classes of attack algorithms. In addition, we observe that the simpler and more scalable rank-by-distance approaches are often competitive with the best, and on occasion significantly outperform gradient-based methods. Finally, we show that several state-of-the-art defenses against other classes of poisoning attacks exhibit, at best, limited efficacy in our setting.

Intent learning, which aims to learn users' intents for user understanding and item recommendation, has become a hot research spot in recent years. However, the existing methods suffer from complex and cumbersome alternating optimization, limiting the performance and scalability. To this end, we propose a novel intent learning method termed \underline{ELCRec}, by unifying behavior representation learning into an \underline{E}nd-to-end \underline{L}earnable \underline{C}lustering framework, for effective and efficient \underline{Rec}ommendation. Concretely, we encode users' behavior sequences and initialize the cluster centers (latent intents) as learnable neurons. Then, we design a novel learnable clustering module to separate different cluster centers, thus decoupling users' complex intents. Meanwhile, it guides the network to learn intents from behaviors by forcing behavior embeddings close to cluster centers. This allows simultaneous optimization of recommendation and clustering via mini-batch data. Moreover, we propose intent-assisted contrastive learning by using cluster centers as self-supervision signals, further enhancing mutual promotion. Both experimental results and theoretical analyses demonstrate the superiority of ELCRec from six perspectives. Compared to the runner-up, ELCRec improves NDCG@5 by 8.9\% and reduces computational costs by 22.5\% on Beauty dataset. Furthermore, due to the scalability and universal applicability, we deploy this method on the industrial recommendation system with 130 million page views and achieve promising results.

The rapid advancement and adoption of generative AI (GenAI) technologies like ChatGPT signify the dawn of "The Age of AI." (Gates, 2023; Kissinger, Schmidt, & Huttenlocher, 2021) These developments mark a significant leap in the capabilities and adoption of AI systems. However, for many people, the swift and disorienting integration of AI into daily life raises many issues (Cugurullo & Acheampong, 2023; Fietta, Zecchinato, Stasi, Polato, & Monaro, 2022; Qasem, 2023). Concerns include the potential impacts on employment, privacy, and inequality, along with broader societal implications like human rights, mental health, and the preservation of democratic norms (Future of Life Institute, 2023; Prabhakaran, Mitchell, Gebru, & Gabriel, 2022; Shahriari & Shahriari, 2017; Stray, 2020). This article argues for the importance of wellbeing as a key objective in AI and for human-centered design (HCD) as a key methodology. Based on this framing, it shares a set of key challenges that will face designers of AI for wellbeing, or Positive AI. The idea that AI should support wellbeing is not uncommon. In 2018, Zuckerberg (2018) (CEO of Meta, previously Facebook) publicly stated that wellbeing should be the goal of AI. Further, in an interview Jan Leike (Wiblin, n.d.) (head of the'Superalignment' research lab at OpenAI) said AI optimization should align to "flourishing."

The most famous virtual valets around today--Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant--are a lot less impressive than the latest AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Bard. When the fruits of the recent generative AI boom get properly integrated into those legacy assistant bots, they will surely get much more interesting. To get a preview of what's next, I took an experimental AI voice helper called vimGPT for a test run. When I asked it to "subscribe to WIRED," it got to work with impressive skill, finding the correct web page and accessing the online form. If it had access to my credit card details I'm pretty sure it would have nailed it.

Due to strong capabilities in conducting fluent, multi-turn conversations with users, Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to further improve the performance of Conversational Recommender System (CRS). Unlike the aimless chit-chat that LLM excels at, CRS has a clear target. So it is imperative to control the dialogue flow in the LLM to successfully recommend appropriate items to the users. Furthermore, user feedback in CRS can assist the system in better modeling user preferences, which has been ignored by existing studies. However, simply prompting LLM to conduct conversational recommendation cannot address the above two key challenges. In this paper, we propose Multi-Agent Conversational Recommender System (MACRS) which contains two essential modules. First, we design a multi-agent act planning framework, which can control the dialogue flow based on four LLM-based agents. This cooperative multi-agent framework will generate various candidate responses based on different dialogue acts and then choose the most appropriate response as the system response, which can help MACRS plan suitable dialogue acts. Second, we propose a user feedback-aware reflection mechanism which leverages user feedback to reason errors made in previous turns to adjust the dialogue act planning, and higher-level user information from implicit semantics. We conduct extensive experiments based on user simulator to demonstrate the effectiveness of MACRS in recommendation and user preferences collection. Experimental results illustrate that MACRS demonstrates an improvement in user interaction experience compared to directly using LLMs.

This survey paper provides a comprehensive analysis of big data algorithms in recommendation systems, addressing the lack of depth and precision in existing literature. It proposes a two-pronged approach: a thorough analysis of current algorithms and a novel, hierarchical taxonomy for precise categorization. The taxonomy is based on a tri-level hierarchy, starting with the methodology category and narrowing down to specific techniques. Such a framework allows for a structured and comprehensive classification of algorithms, assisting researchers in understanding the interrelationships among diverse algorithms and techniques. Covering a wide range of algorithms, this taxonomy first categorizes algorithms into four main analysis types: User and Item Similarity-Based Methods, Hybrid and Combined Approaches, Deep Learning and Algorithmic Methods, and Mathematical Modeling Methods, with further subdivisions into sub-categories and techniques. The paper incorporates both empirical and experimental evaluations to differentiate between the techniques. The empirical evaluation ranks the techniques based on four criteria. The experimental assessments rank the algorithms that belong to the same category, sub-category, technique, and sub-technique. Also, the paper illuminates the future prospects of big data techniques in recommendation systems, underscoring potential advancements and opportunities for further research in this field

In recent years, there has been an increasing recognition that when machine learning (ML) algorithms are used to automate decisions, they may mistreat individuals or groups, with legal, ethical, or economic implications. Recommender systems are prominent examples of these machine learning (ML) systems that aid users in making decisions. The majority of past literature research on RS fairness treats user and item fairness concerns independently, ignoring the fact that recommender systems function in a two-sided marketplace. In this paper, we propose CP-FairRank, an optimization-based re-ranking algorithm that seamlessly integrates fairness constraints from both the consumer and producer side in a joint objective framework. The framework is generalizable and may take into account varied fairness settings based on group segmentation, recommendation model selection, and domain, which is one of its key characteristics. For instance, we demonstrate that the system may jointly increase consumer and producer fairness when (un)protected consumer groups are defined on the basis of their activity level and main-streamness, while producer groups are defined according to their popularity level. For empirical validation, through large-scale on eight datasets and four mainstream collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation models, we demonstrate that our proposed strategy is able to improve both consumer and producer fairness without compromising or very little overall recommendation quality, demonstrating the role algorithms may play in avoiding data biases.

In patent prosecution, timely and effective responses to Office Actions (OAs) are crucial for acquiring patents, yet past automation and AI research have scarcely addressed this aspect. To address this gap, our study introduces the Patent Office Action Response Intelligence System (PARIS) and its advanced version, the Large Language Model Enhanced PARIS (LE-PARIS). These systems are designed to expedite the efficiency of patent attorneys in collaboratively handling OA responses. The systems' key features include the construction of an OA Topics Database, development of Response Templates, and implementation of Recommender Systems and LLM-based Response Generation. Our validation involves a multi-paradigmatic analysis using the USPTO Office Action database and longitudinal data of attorney interactions with our systems over six years. Through five studies, we examine the constructiveness of OA topics (studies 1 and 2) using topic modeling and the proposed Delphi process, the efficacy of our proposed hybrid recommender system tailored for OA (both LLM-based and non-LLM-based) (study 3), the quality of response generation (study 4), and the practical value of the systems in real-world scenarios via user studies (study 5). Results demonstrate that both PARIS and LE-PARIS significantly meet key metrics and positively impact attorney performance.

In this age where data is abundant, the ability to distill meaningful insights from the sea of information is essential. Our research addresses the computational and resource inefficiencies that current Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs) suffer from. especially those employing attention-based models like SASRec, These systems are designed for next-item recommendations in various applications, from e-commerce to social networks. However, such systems suffer from substantial computational costs and resource consumption during the inference stage. To tackle these issues, our research proposes a novel method that combines automatic pruning techniques with advanced model architectures. We also explore the potential of resource-constrained Neural Architecture Search (NAS), a technique prevalent in the realm of recommendation systems, to fine-tune models for reduced FLOPs, latency, and energy usage while retaining or even enhancing accuracy. The main contribution of our work is developing the Elastic Architecture Search for Efficient Long-term Sequential Recommender Systems (EASRec). This approach aims to find optimal compact architectures for attention-based SRSs, ensuring accuracy retention. EASRec introduces data-aware gates that leverage historical information from input data batch to improve the performance of the recommendation network. Additionally, it utilizes a dynamic resource constraint approach, which standardizes the search process and results in more appropriate architectures. The effectiveness of our methodology is validated through exhaustive experiments on three benchmark datasets, which demonstrates EASRec's superiority in SRSs. Our research set a new standard for future exploration into efficient and accurate recommender systems, signifying a substantial advancement within this swiftly advancing field.

Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines are here. Teri Hatcher admitted she got kicked off a dating app after her profile was flagged as fake. Hatcher, 59, claimed she hasn't met anyone on the apps, but has tried all of them at this stage in her dating journey. The actress claimed she has used the dating app most celebrities use, but noted "those guys only want to date 30-year-olds." "I've tried them all, and I tried my latest one," she said during an episode of "Getting Grilled with Curtis Stone." "You know, I thought, I'm gonna say to the universe that I am open and vulnerable, and I'm putting myself out there," Hatcher explained.