Given a sequence of sets, where each set has a timestamp and contains an arbitrary number of elements, temporal sets prediction aims to predict the elements in the subsequent set. Previous studies for temporal sets prediction mainly focus on the modelling of elements and implicitly represent each user's preference based on his/her interacted elements. However, user preferences are often continuously evolving and the evolutionary trend cannot be fully captured with the indirect learning paradigm of user preferences. To this end, we propose a continuous-time user preference modelling framework for temporal sets prediction, which explicitly models the evolving preference of each user by maintaining a memory bank to store the states of all the users and elements. Specifically, we first construct a universal sequence by arranging all the user-set interactions in a non-descending temporal order, and then chronologically learn from each user-set interaction. For each interaction, we continuously update the memories of the related user and elements based on their currently encoded messages and past memories. Moreover, we present a personalized user behavior learning module to discover user-specific characteristics based on each user's historical sequence, which aggregates the previously interacted elements from dual perspectives according to the user and elements. Finally, we develop a set-batch algorithm to improve the model efficiency, which can create time-consistent batches in advance and achieve 3.5x and 3.0x speedups in the training and evaluation process on average. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-arts under both transductive and inductive settings. The good interpretability of our method is also shown.

From where you go to what you say to Siri and Google Assistant, most smartphone apps collect your data continuously. Companies then sell this data to advertising companies, hence why it can sometimes feel like you are recommended ads about products you mentioned in passing once. Data privacy advocate Gaël Duval said that, thankfully, it's possible to change settings so this doesn't happen. Murena believes this has measurable benefits: he says that poor data privacy and personalised adverts directly contribute to increased time spent online, impulse buying and even worsening mental health problems – as tech companies understand more about you, they will target adverts at you more precisely. Research by TASO in 2022 found that 79 percent of people were worried about online technology companies using their data, and 65 percent felt uncomfortable sharing their data to use services for free.

This paper proposes Text mAtching based SequenTial rEcommendation model (TASTE), which maps items and users in an embedding space and recommends items by matching their text representations. TASTE verbalizes items and user-item interactions using identifiers and attributes of items. To better characterize user behaviors, TASTE additionally proposes an attention sparsity method, which enables TASTE to model longer user-item interactions by reducing the self-attention computations during encoding. Our experiments show that TASTE outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on widely used sequential recommendation datasets. TASTE alleviates the cold start problem by representing long-tail items using full-text modeling and bringing the benefits of pretrained language models to recommendation systems. Our further analyses illustrate that TASTE significantly improves the recommendation accuracy by reducing the popularity bias of previous item id based recommendation models and returning more appropriate and text-relevant items to satisfy users. All codes are available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/TASTE.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are fundamental for natural language processing applications. Most existing PLMs are not tailored to the noisy user-generated text on social media, and the pre-training does not factor in the valuable social engagement logs available in a social network. We present TwHIN-BERT, a multilingual language model productionized at Twitter, trained on in-domain data from the popular social network. TwHIN-BERT differs from prior pre-trained language models as it is trained with not only text-based self-supervision, but also with a social objective based on the rich social engagements within a Twitter heterogeneous information network (TwHIN). Our model is trained on 7 billion tweets covering over 100 distinct languages, providing a valuable representation to model short, noisy, user-generated text. We evaluate our model on various multilingual social recommendation and semantic understanding tasks and demonstrate significant metric improvement over established pre-trained language models. We open-source TwHIN-BERT and our curated hashtag prediction and social engagement benchmark datasets to the research community.

Model-free RL-based recommender systems have recently received increasing research attention due to their capability to handle partial feedback and long-term rewards. However, most existing research has ignored a critical feature in recommender systems: one user's feedback on the same item at different times is random. The stochastic rewards property essentially differs from that in classic RL scenarios with deterministic rewards, which makes RL-based recommender systems much more challenging. In this paper, we first demonstrate in a simulator environment where using direct stochastic feedback results in a significant drop in performance. Then to handle the stochastic feedback more efficiently, we design two stochastic reward stabilization frameworks that replace the direct stochastic feedback with that learned by a supervised model. Both frameworks are model-agnostic, i.e., they can effectively utilize various supervised models. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed frameworks over different RL-based recommendation baselines with extensive experiments on a recommendation simulator as well as an industrial-level recommender system.

Many e-commerce marketplaces offer their users fast delivery options for free to meet the increasing needs of users, imposing an excessive burden on city logistics. Therefore, understanding e-commerce users' preference for delivery options is a key to designing logistics policies. To this end, this study designs a stated choice survey in which respondents are faced with choice tasks among different delivery options and time slots, which was completed by 4,062 users from the three major metropolitan areas in Japan. To analyze the data, mixed logit models capturing taste heterogeneity as well as flexible substitution patterns have been estimated. The model estimation results indicate that delivery attributes including fee, time, and time slot size are significant determinants of the delivery option choices. Associations between users' preferences and socio-demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, teleworking frequency and the presence of a delivery box, were also suggested. Moreover, we analyzed two willingness-to-pay measures for delivery, namely, the value of delivery time savings (VODT) and the value of time slot shortening (VOTS), and applied a non-semiparametric approach to estimate their distributions in a data-oriented manner. Although VODT has a large heterogeneity among respondents, the estimated median VODT is 25.6 JPY/day, implying that more than half of the respondents would wait an additional day if the delivery fee were increased by only 26 JPY, that is, they do not necessarily need a fast delivery option but often request it when cheap or almost free. Moreover, VOTS was found to be low, distributed with the median of 5.0 JPY/hour; that is, users do not highly value the reduction in time slot size in monetary terms. These findings on e-commerce users' preferences can help in designing levels of service for last-mile delivery to significantly improve its efficiency.

When queried about the larger significance of the Heads-Up vision, the authors reflect on a regular weekday in their lives--eight hours spent in front of a computer and another two hours on the smartphone. Achievements in digital productivity come too often at the cost of being removed from the real world. What wonderful digital technology humans have come to create, perhaps the most significant in the history of our co-evolution with tools. Could computing systems be so well-integrated that they not only support but enhance our experience of physical reality? The ability to straddle both worlds--the digital and non-digital--is increasingly pertinent, and we believe it is time for a paradigm shift. We invite individuals and organizations to join us in our journey to design for more seamless computing support, improving the way future generations live, learn, work and play.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for generating document embeddings using a combination of Sentence-BERT (SBERT) and RoBERTa, two state-of-the-art natural language processing models. Our approach treats sentences as tokens and generates embeddings for them, allowing the model to capture both intra-sentence and inter-sentence relations within a document. We evaluate our model on a book recommendation task and demonstrate its effectiveness in generating more semantically rich and accurate document embeddings. To assess the performance of our approach, we conducted experiments on a book recommendation task using the Goodreads dataset. We compared the document embeddings generated using our MULTI-BERT model to those generated using SBERT alone. We used precision as our evaluation metric to compare the quality of the generated embeddings. Our results showed that our model consistently outperformed SBERT in terms of the quality of the generated embeddings. Furthermore, we found that our model was able to capture more nuanced semantic relations within documents, leading to more accurate recommendations. Overall, our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and suggest that it is a promising direction for improving the performance of recommendation systems

Artificial intelligence is not only increasingly used in business and administration contexts, but a race for its regulation is also underway, with the EU spearheading the efforts. Contrary to existing literature, this article suggests, however, that the most far-reaching and effective EU rules for AI applications in the digital economy will not be contained in the proposed AI Act - but have just been enacted in the Digital Markets Act. We analyze the impact of the DMA and related EU acts on AI models and their underlying data across four key areas: disclosure requirements; the regulation of AI training data; access rules; and the regime for fair rankings. The paper demonstrates that fairness, in the sense of the DMA, goes beyond traditionally protected categories of non-discrimination law on which scholarship at the intersection of AI and law has so far largely focused on. Rather, we draw on competition law and the FRAND criteria known from intellectual property law to interpret and refine the DMA provisions on fair rankings. Moreover, we show how, based on CJEU jurisprudence, a coherent interpretation of the concept of non-discrimination in both traditional non-discrimination and competition law may be found. The final part sketches specific proposals for a comprehensive framework of transparency, access, and fairness under the DMA and beyond.

For Apple users, you know what you're going to get each new model of iPhone. Android users on the other hand have a ton of makes and models to consider. So when you get a new Android device, it's not always clear how to take a screenshot. For most, you can either use the physical buttons on the handset, or ask your handy virtual assistant to take one for you. Whether you have a Samsung, Google, Motorola or phone, here's how to take a screenshot on (almost) any Android device.