Personal Assistant Systems
GEMRec: Towards Generative Model Recommendation
Guo, Yuanhe, Liu, Haoming, Wen, Hongyi
Recommender Systems are built to retrieve relevant items to satisfy users' information needs. The candidate corpus usually consists of a finite set of items that are ready to be served, such as videos, products, or articles. With recent advances in Generative AI such as GPT and Diffusion models, a new form of recommendation task is yet to be explored where items are to be created by generative models with personalized prompts. Taking image generation as an example, with a single prompt from the user and access to a generative model, it is possible to generate hundreds of new images in a few minutes. How shall we attain personalization in the presence of "infinite" items? In this preliminary study, we propose a two-stage framework, namely Prompt-Model Retrieval and Generated Item Ranking, to approach this new task formulation. We release GEMRec-18K, a prompt-model interaction dataset with 18K images generated by 200 publicly-available generative models paired with a diverse set of 90 textual prompts. Our findings demonstrate the promise of generative model recommendation as a novel personalization problem and the limitations of existing evaluation metrics. We highlight future directions for the RecSys community to advance towards generative recommender systems. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/MAPS-research/GEMRec.
Apple Watch Series 9 falls to a new low of $310
There's something so satisfying about waiting to buy a newly released product and then seeing it go on sale. Take the Apple Watch Series 9, which debuted in September at $399 before dropping to $329 for Black Friday. If you still waited, there's good news: the Apple Watch Series 9 in (Product) Red and Storm Blue is even cheaper now, at a new all-time low of $310. The great deal comes courtesy of an eight percent discount and a $59 coupon that will activate at checkout. It's down to an new all-time low thanks to a sale and a coupon thrown in at checkout.
Seller-side Outcome Fairness in Online Marketplaces
Ye, Zikun, Maragheh, Reza Yousefi, Morishetti, Lalitesh, Vashishtha, Shanu, Cho, Jason, Nag, Kaushiki, Kumar, Sushant, Achan, Kannan
This paper aims to investigate and achieve seller-side fairness within online marketplaces, where many sellers and their items are not sufficiently exposed to customers in an e-commerce platform. This phenomenon raises concerns regarding the potential loss of revenue associated with less exposed items as well as less marketplace diversity. We introduce the notion of seller-side outcome fairness and build an optimization model to balance collected recommendation rewards and the fairness metric. We then propose a gradient-based data-driven algorithm based on the duality and bandit theory. Our numerical experiments on real e-commerce data sets show that our algorithm can lift seller fairness measures while not hurting metrics like collected Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) and total purchases.
Adaptive spectral graph wavelets for collaborative filtering
Alshareet, Osama, Hamza, A. Ben
Collaborative filtering is a popular approach in recommender systems, whose objective is to provide personalized item suggestions to potential users based on their purchase or browsing history. However, personalized recommendations require considerable amount of behavioral data on users, which is usually unavailable for new users, giving rise to the cold-start problem. To help alleviate this challenging problem, we introduce a spectral graph wavelet collaborative filtering framework for implicit feedback data, where users, items and their interactions are represented as a bipartite graph. Specifically, we first propose an adaptive transfer function by leveraging a power transform with the goal of stabilizing the variance of graph frequencies in the spectral domain. Then, we design a deep recommendation model for efficient learning of low-dimensional embeddings of users and items using spectral graph wavelets in an end-to-end fashion. In addition to capturing the graph's local and global structures, our approach yields localization of graph signals in both spatial and spectral domains, and hence not only learns discriminative representations of users and items, but also promotes the recommendation quality. The effectiveness of our proposed model is demonstrated through extensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets, achieving better recommendation performance compared with strong baseline methods.
A Dating App Tried to Update Its Interface. Unbridled, Horny Chaos Ensued.
When Aaron* logged on to the kinky, nonmonogamy-focused dating app Feeld on Thursday to finalize plans with a match, the interface wouldn't load. As a middle-aged man in an ethically nonmonogamous relationship, Aaron considers Feeld a great way to meet other like-minded people in his area--and that's exactly what he was hoping to do this past Friday. Someone he had a connection with was in town for one night only, and he wanted to take advantage. He tried logging in again and changing his Wi-Fi connection, but nothing seemed to do the trick. Flummoxed, he took to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to see if there was any explanation.
Hidden feature in your Amazon Echo that improves your Wi-Fi signal
How to silence group chats and emails without missing important notifications on your iPhone. If you work from home, you know how important it is to have a fast and reliable Wi-Fi connection. But sometimes, your Wi-Fi can get slow or spotty, especially if you have a large house or a lot of devices using the network at the same time. You might think that the only solution is to move closer to your router or buy a more expensive one. But what if we told you that you can extend your Wi-Fi coverage by using your Amazon Echo device and an Eero mesh system?
Dynamic Collaborative Filtering for Matrix- and Tensor-based Recommender Systems
Saiapin, Albert, Oseledets, Ivan, Frolov, Evgeny
In production applications of recommender systems, a continuous data flow is employed to update models in real-time. Many recommender models often require complete retraining to adapt to new data. In this work, we introduce a novel collaborative filtering model for sequential problems known as Tucker Integrator Recommender - TIRecA. TIRecA efficiently updates its parameters using only the new data segment, allowing incremental addition of new users and items to the recommender system. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, we conducted experiments on four publicly available datasets: MovieLens 20M, Amazon Beauty, Amazon Toys and Games, and Steam. Our comparison with general matrix and tensor-based baselines in terms of prediction quality and computational time reveals that TIRecA achieves comparable quality to the baseline methods, while being 10-20 times faster in training time.
Intelligent Virtual Assistants with LLM-based Process Automation
Guan, Yanchu, Wang, Dong, Chu, Zhixuan, Wang, Shiyu, Ni, Feiyue, Song, Ruihua, Li, Longfei, Gu, Jinjie, Zhuang, Chenyi
While intelligent virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have become ubiquitous in modern life, they still face limitations in their ability to follow multi-step instructions and accomplish complex goals articulated in natural language. However, recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) show promise for overcoming existing barriers by enhancing natural language processing and reasoning capabilities. Though promising, applying LLMs to create more advanced virtual assistants still faces challenges like ensuring robust performance and handling variability in real-world user commands. This paper proposes a novel LLM-based virtual assistant that can automatically perform multi-step operations within mobile apps based on high-level user requests. The system represents an advance in assistants by providing an end-to-end solution for parsing instructions, reasoning about goals, and executing actions. LLM-based Process Automation (LLMPA) has modules for decomposing instructions, generating descriptions, detecting interface elements, predicting next actions, and error checking. Experiments demonstrate the system completing complex mobile operation tasks in Alipay based on natural language instructions. This showcases how large language models can enable automated assistants to accomplish real-world tasks. The main contributions are the novel LLMPA architecture optimized for app process automation, the methodology for applying LLMs to mobile apps, and demonstrations of multi-step task completion in a real-world environment. Notably, this work represents the first real-world deployment and extensive evaluation of a large language model-based virtual assistant in a widely used mobile application with an enormous user base numbering in the hundreds of millions.
E4SRec: An Elegant Effective Efficient Extensible Solution of Large Language Models for Sequential Recommendation
Li, Xinhang, Chen, Chong, Zhao, Xiangyu, Zhang, Yong, Xing, Chunxiao
The recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked interest in harnessing their potential within recommender systems. Since LLMs are designed for natural language tasks, existing recommendation approaches have predominantly transformed recommendation tasks into open-domain natural language generation tasks. However, this approach necessitates items to possess rich semantic information, often generates out-of-range results, and suffers from notably low efficiency and limited extensibility. Furthermore, practical ID-based recommendation strategies, reliant on a huge number of unique identities (IDs) to represent users and items, have gained prominence in real-world recommender systems due to their effectiveness and efficiency. Nevertheless, the incapacity of LLMs to model IDs presents a formidable challenge when seeking to leverage LLMs for personalized recommendations. In this paper, we introduce an Elegant Effective Efficient Extensible solution for large language models for Sequential Recommendation (E4SRec), which seamlessly integrates LLMs with traditional recommender systems that exclusively utilize IDs to represent items. Specifically, E4SRec takes ID sequences as inputs, ensuring that the generated outputs fall within the candidate lists. Furthermore, E4SRec possesses the capability to generate the entire ranking list in a single forward process, and demands only a minimal set of pluggable parameters, which are trained for each dataset while keeping the entire LLM frozen. We substantiate the effectiveness, efficiency, and extensibility of our proposed E4SRec through comprehensive experiments conducted on four widely-used real-world datasets. The implementation code is accessible at https://github.com/HestiaSky/E4SRec/.
Normed Spaces for Graph Embedding
Taha, Diaaeldin, Zhao, Wei, Riestenberg, J. Maxwell, Strube, Michael
Theoretical results from discrete geometry suggest that normed spaces can abstractly embed finite metric spaces with surprisingly low theoretical bounds on distortion in low dimensions. In this paper, inspired by this theoretical insight, we highlight normed spaces as a more flexible and computationally efficient alternative to several popular Riemannian manifolds for learning graph embeddings. Normed space embeddings significantly outperform several popular manifolds on a large range of synthetic and real-world graph reconstruction benchmark datasets while requiring significantly fewer computational resources. We also empirically verify the superiority of normed space embeddings on growing families of graphs associated with negative, zero, and positive curvature, further reinforcing the flexibility of normed spaces in capturing diverse graph structures as graph sizes increase. Lastly, we demonstrate the utility of normed space embeddings on two applied graph embedding tasks, namely, link prediction and recommender systems. Our work highlights the potential of normed spaces for geometric graph representation learning, raises new research questions, and offers a valuable tool for experimental mathematics in the field of finite metric space embeddings. We make our code and data publically available.