Inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, we introduce DUMA, a novel conversational agent framework that embodies a dual-mind mechanism through the utilization of two generative Large Language Models (LLMs) dedicated to fast and slow thinking respectively. The fast thinking model serves as the primary interface for external interactions and initial response generation, evaluating the necessity for engaging the slow thinking model based on the complexity of the complete response. When invoked, the slow thinking model takes over the conversation, engaging in meticulous planning, reasoning, and tool utilization to provide a well-analyzed response. This dual-mind configuration allows for a seamless transition between intuitive responses and deliberate problem-solving processes based on the situation. We have constructed a conversational agent to handle online inquiries in the real estate industry. The experiment proves that our method balances effectiveness and efficiency, and has a significant improvement compared to the baseline.

We study high-dimensional multi-armed contextual bandits with batched feedback where the $T$ steps of online interactions are divided into $L$ batches. In specific, each batch collects data according to a policy that depends on previous batches and the rewards are revealed only at the end of the batch. Such a feedback structure is popular in applications such as personalized medicine and online advertisement, where the online data often do not arrive in a fully serial manner. We consider high-dimensional and linear settings where the reward function of the bandit model admits either a sparse or low-rank structure and ask how small a number of batches are needed for a comparable performance with fully dynamic data in which $L = T$. For these settings, we design a provably sample-efficient algorithm which achieves a $ \mathcal{\tilde O}(s_0^2 \log^2 T)$ regret in the sparse case and $ \mathcal{\tilde O} ( r ^2 \log^2 T)$ regret in the low-rank case, using only $L = \mathcal{O}( \log T)$ batches. Here $s_0$ and $r$ are the sparsity and rank of the reward parameter in sparse and low-rank cases, respectively, and $ \mathcal{\tilde O}(\cdot)$ omits logarithmic factors involving the feature dimensions. In other words, our algorithm achieves regret bounds comparable to those in fully sequential setting with only $\mathcal{O}( \log T)$ batches. Our algorithm features a novel batch allocation method that adjusts the batch sizes according to the estimation accuracy within each batch and cumulative regret. Furthermore, we also conduct experiments with synthetic and real-world data to validate our theory.

JBL has unveiled an all-new series of smart speakers, which means yet another option to investigate in the overgrown smart speaker marketplace. Except there is something different about JBL's stylish Authentics line. For one thing, they're arguably the coolest-looking speakers out there, borrowing aesthetically from JBL speakers past and present, like the L100, to dig up some slick nostalgia. When it comes to smarts, they're the first of their kind to offer both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant in conjunction, meaning you don't have to choose between them. This opens up an array of use cases, and the two assistants mostly work well side by side, if not always together.

In this paper, we highlight that both conformity and risk preference matter in making fund investment decisions beyond personal interest and seek to jointly characterize these aspects in a disentangled manner. Consequently, we develop a novel M ulti-granularity Graph Disentangled Learning framework named MGDL to effectively perform intelligent matching of fund investment products. Benefiting from the well-established fund graph and the attention module, multi-granularity user representations are derived from historical behaviors to separately express personal interest, conformity and risk preference in a fine-grained way. To attain stronger disentangled representations with specific semantics, MGDL explicitly involve two self-supervised signals, i.e., fund type based contrasts and fund popularity. Extensive experiments in offline and online environments verify the effectiveness of MGDL.

Cross-domain sequential recommendation (CDSR) aims to address the data sparsity problems that exist in traditional sequential recommendation (SR) systems. The existing approaches aim to design a specific cross-domain unit that can transfer and propagate information across multiple domains by relying on overlapping users with abundant behaviors. However, in real-world recommender systems, CDSR scenarios usually consist of a majority of long-tailed users with sparse behaviors and cold-start users who only exist in one domain. This leads to a drop in the performance of existing CDSR methods in the real-world industry platform. Therefore, improving the consistency and effectiveness of models in open-world CDSR scenarios is crucial for constructing CDSR models (\textit{1st} CH). Recently, some SR approaches have utilized auxiliary behaviors to complement the information for long-tailed users. However, these multi-behavior SR methods cannot deliver promising performance in CDSR, as they overlook the semantic gap between target and auxiliary behaviors, as well as user interest deviation across domains (\textit{2nd} CH).

Recommender systems have become ubiquitous in the past years. They solve the tyranny of choice problem faced by many users, and are utilized by many online businesses to drive engagement and sales. Besides other criticisms, like creating filter bubbles within social networks, recommender systems are often reproved for collecting considerable amounts of personal data. However, to personalize recommendations, personal information is fundamentally required. A recent distributed learning scheme called federated learning has made it possible to learn from personal user data without its central collection. Consequently, we present a recommender system for movie recommendations, which provides privacy and thus trustworthiness on multiple levels: First and foremost, it is trained using federated learning and thus, by its very nature, privacy-preserving, while still enabling users to benefit from global insights. Furthermore, a novel federated learning scheme, called FedQ, is employed, which not only addresses the problem of non-i.i.d.-ness and small local datasets, but also prevents input data reconstruction attacks by aggregating client updates early. Finally, to reduce the communication overhead, compression is applied, which significantly compresses the exchanged neural network parametrizations to a fraction of their original size. We conjecture that this may also improve data privacy through its lossy quantization stage.

Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Sports wagering is currently legal or poised to go legal in about 29 states across the U.S. Maine and Florida represent the two most recent states to permit sports betting. The growth of sports gambling was sparked by the Supreme Court's decision to strike down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018. The ruling effectively allowed states to decide whether sports wagering would be legal within their respective borders.

In this study, we investigate the emerging threat of inaudible acoustic attacks targeting digital voice assistants, a critical concern given their projected prevalence to exceed the global population by 2024. Our research extends the feasibility of these attacks across various platforms like Amazon's Alexa, Android, iOS, and Cortana, revealing significant vulnerabilities in smart devices. The twelve attack vectors identified include successful manipulation of smart home devices and automotive systems, potential breaches in military communication, and challenges in critical infrastructure security. We quantitatively show that attack success rates hover around 60%, with the ability to activate devices remotely from over 100 feet away. Additionally, these attacks threaten critical infrastructure, emphasizing the need for multifaceted defensive strategies combining acoustic shielding, advanced signal processing, machine learning, and robust user authentication to mitigate these risks.

Web 3.0, as the third generation of the World Wide Web, aims to solve contemporary problems of trust, centralization, and data ownership. Driven by the latest advances in cutting-edge technologies, Web 3.0 is moving towards a more open, decentralized, intelligent, and interconnected network. However, increasingly widespread data breaches have raised awareness of online privacy and security of personal data. Additionally, since Web 3.0 is a sophisticated and complex convergence, the technical details behind it are not as clear as the characteristics it presents. In this survey, we conduct an in-depth exploration of Web 3.0 from the perspectives of blockchain, artificial intelligence, and edge computing. Specifically, we begin with summarizing the evolution of the Internet and providing an overview of these three key technological factors. Afterward, we provide a thorough analysis of each technology separately, including its relevance to Web 3.0, key technology components, and practical applications. We also propose decentralized storage and computing solutions by exploring the integration of technologies. Finally, we highlight the key challenges alongside potential research directions. Through the combination and mutual complementation of multiple technologies, Web 3.0 is expected to return more control and ownership of data and digital assets back to users.

This paper investigates Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR), a promising method that uses information from multiple domains (more than three) to generate accurate and diverse recommendations, and takes into account the sequential nature of user interactions. The effectiveness of these systems often depends on the complex interplay among the multiple domains. In this dynamic landscape, the problem of negative transfer arises, where heterogeneous knowledge between dissimilar domains leads to performance degradation due to differences in user preferences across these domains. As a remedy, we propose a new CDSR framework that addresses the problem of negative transfer by assessing the extent of negative transfer from one domain to another and adaptively assigning low weight values to the corresponding prediction losses. To this end, the amount of negative transfer is estimated by measuring the marginal contribution of each domain to model performance based on a cooperative game theory. In addition, a hierarchical contrastive learning approach that incorporates information from the sequence of coarse-level categories into that of fine-level categories (e.g., item level) when implementing contrastive learning was developed to mitigate negative transfer. Despite the potentially low relevance between domains at the fine-level, there may be higher relevance at the category level due to its generalised and broader preferences. We show that our model is superior to prior works in terms of model performance on two real-world datasets across ten different domains.