Recent years have witnessed the great successes of embedding-based methods in recommender systems. Despite their decent performance, we argue one potential limitation of these methods -- the embedding magnitude has not been explicitly modulated, which may aggravate popularity bias and training instability, hindering the model from making a good recommendation. It motivates us to leverage the embedding normalization in recommendation. By normalizing user/item embeddings to a specific value, we empirically observe impressive performance gains (9\% on average) on four real-world datasets. Although encouraging, we also reveal a serious limitation when applying normalization in recommendation -- the performance is highly sensitive to the choice of the temperature $\tau$ which controls the scale of the normalized embeddings. To fully foster the merits of the normalization while circumvent its limitation, this work studied on how to adaptively set the proper $\tau$. Towards this end, we first make a comprehensive analyses of $\tau$ to fully understand its role on recommendation. We then accordingly develop an adaptive fine-grained strategy Adap-$\tau$ for the temperature with satisfying four desirable properties including adaptivity, personalized, efficiency and model-agnostic. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposal. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/junkangwu/Adap_tau}.

Apple is making a small but mighty change to Siri in the new iOS 17 - users can drop the'Hey' and only need to say'Siri' to activate the virtual assistant. The change has been a sought-after feature of iOS fans, and it seems Apple has finally listened. The operating system will also see new apps geared toward your physical and mental health, along with personalized posters of a user that shows their photo or emoji to a call recipient. A live voicemail feature also transcribes messages directly on the display, allowing you to ignore or answer the call. Apple is making a small but mighty change to Siri in the new iOS 17 - users can drop the'Hey' and only need to say'Siri' to activate the virtual assistant It is only in the past 20 years that Apple has used the conference as a major launchpad for new devices, including the HomePod speaker in 2007 and the iPhone 4 in 2010.

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) aim to provide recommendation services via natural language conversations. Although a number of approaches have been proposed for developing capable CRSs, they typically rely on sufficient training data for training. Since it is difficult to annotate recommendation-oriented dialogue datasets, existing CRS approaches often suffer from the issue of insufficient training due to the scarcity of training data. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a CounterFactual data simulation approach for CRS, named CFCRS, to alleviate the issue of data scarcity in CRSs. Our approach is developed based on the framework of counterfactual data augmentation, which gradually incorporates the rewriting to the user preference from a real dialogue without interfering with the entire conversation flow. To develop our approach, we characterize user preference and organize the conversation flow by the entities involved in the dialogue, and design a multi-stage recommendation dialogue simulator based on a conversation flow language model. Under the guidance of the learned user preference and dialogue schema, the flow language model can produce reasonable, coherent conversation flows, which can be further realized into complete dialogues. Based on the simulator, we perform the intervention at the representations of the interacted entities of target users, and design an adversarial training method with a curriculum schedule that can gradually optimize the data augmentation strategy. Extensive experiments show that our approach can consistently boost the performance of several competitive CRSs, and outperform other data augmentation methods, especially when the training data is limited. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/CFCRS.

Systematic under-counting effects are observed in data collected across many disciplines, e.g., epidemiology and ecology. Under-counted tensor completion (UC-TC) is well-motivated for many data analytics tasks, e.g., inferring the case numbers of infectious diseases at unobserved locations from under-counted case numbers in neighboring regions. However, existing methods for similar problems often lack supports in theory, making it hard to understand the underlying principles and conditions beyond empirical successes. In this work, a low-rank Poisson tensor model with an expressive unknown nonlinear side information extractor is proposed for under-counted multi-aspect data. A joint low-rank tensor completion and neural network learning algorithm is designed to recover the model. Moreover, the UC-TC formulation is supported by theoretical analysis showing that the fully counted entries of the tensor and each entry's under-counting probability can be provably recovered from partial observations -- under reasonable conditions. To our best knowledge, the result is the first to offer theoretical supports for under-counted multi-aspect data completion. Simulations and real-data experiments corroborate the theoretical claims.

Item-to-Item (I2I) recommendation is an important function in most recommendation systems, which generates replacement or complement suggestions for a particular item based on its semantic similarities to other cataloged items. Given that subsets of items in a recommendation system might be co-interacted with by the same set of customers, graph-based models, such as graph neural networks (GNNs), provide a natural framework to combine, ingest and extract valuable insights from such high-order relational interactions between cataloged items, as well as their metadata features, as has been shown in many recent studies. However, learning GNNs effectively for I2I requires ingesting a large amount of relational data, which might not always be available, especially in new, emerging market segments. To mitigate this data bottleneck, we postulate that recommendation patterns learned from existing mature market segments (with private data) could be adapted to build effective warm-start models for emerging ones. To achieve this, we propose and investigate a personalized federated modeling framework based on GNNs to summarize, assemble and adapt recommendation patterns across market segments with heterogeneous customer behaviors into effective local models. Our key contribution is a personalized graph adaptation model that bridges the gap between recent literature on federated GNNs and (non-graph) personalized federated learning, which either does not optimize for the adaptability of the federated model or is restricted to local models with homogeneous parameterization, excluding GNNs with heterogeneous local graphs.

On E-commerce stores, there are rich recommendation content to help shoppers shopping more efficiently. However given numerous products, it's crucial to select most relevant content to reduce the burden of information overload. We introduced a content ranking service powered by a linear causal bandit algorithm to rank and select content for each shopper under each context. The algorithm mainly leverages aggregated customer behavior features, and ignores single shopper level past activities. We study the problem of inferring shoppers interest from historical activities. We propose a deep learning based bandit algorithm that incorporates historical shopping behavior, customer latent shopping goals, and the correlation between customers and content categories. This model produces more personalized content ranking measured by 12.08% nDCG lift.

Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. At long last, an iPhone finally went off while someone was broadcasting a Tampa Bay Rays game. Because the Rays have a guy named Jose Siri on their team. And yes, his last name is pronounced just like the iPhone's "Siri."

Apparently, the introduction of Windows Copilot signaled the end of Cortana on Microsoft's desktop OS. In a new support document first spotted by Windows Central, the tech giant has announced that it will stop supporting the standalone Cortana app for Windows in late 2023. Microsoft launched Cortana as a voice assistant for Windows mobile devices back in 2014. It was supposed to be the company's answer to Apple's Siri, and it even predates Amazon's Alexa, but it never quite achieved their level of recognition and popularity. Over the year, Microsoft scaled back its plans for the voice assistant until it discontinued its Android and iOS apps back in 2021.

Microsoft launched Cortana as an AI assistant and the flagship feature of Windows 10 in 2015. Now, eight years later, Microsoft is pulling the plug. In a support document, Microsoft said that it's ending support for the Cortana app, Cortana's only remaining presence within Windows. Instead, Microsoft said it will encourage users to use other AI-powered features, whether it be within a standalone app or simply part of Windows or Microsoft Edge. Microsoft did say that Cortana will still be available within Outlook Mobile and various versions of Teams, including Microsoft's conferencing solution, Teams Rooms.

Dear Prudence is Slate's advice column. For this edition, Alicia Montgomery, Slate's vice president of audio, will be filling in as Prudie. My friend Kari and I have been close since we were college roommates (we are now just about 40). Kari has been with her long-distance girlfriend Lora for the last four years, and recently Lora has been talking about moving to Kari and my town in order to better facilitate having a baby. The road for them is going to be long, given the mechanics and their ages, but they have all systems go from their doctors. The problem is that I know Kari is not 100 percent committed to Lora; she says she's not sure she's the one and has built (but not, to my knowledge, deployed) dating profiles on multiple sites and expresses jealousy to me quite often about my adventurous dating life.