Personal Assistant Systems
Meta Matrix Factorization for Federated Rating Predictions
Lin, Yujie, Ren, Pengjie, Chen, Zhumin, Ren, Zhaochun, Yu, Dongxiao, Ma, Jun, de Rijke, Maarten, Cheng, Xiuzhen
Federated recommender systems have distinct advantages in terms of privacy protection over traditional recommender systems that are centralized at a data center. However, previous work on federated recommender systems does not fully consider the limitations of storage, RAM, energy and communication bandwidth in a mobile environment. The scales of the models proposed are too large to be easily run on mobile devices. And existing federated recommender systems need to fine-tune recommendation models on each device, making it hard to effectively exploit collaborative filtering information among users/devices. Our goal in this paper is to design a novel federated learning framework for rating prediction (RP) for mobile environments. We introduce a federated matrix factorization (MF) framework, named meta matrix factorization (MetaMF). Given a user, we first obtain a collaborative vector by collecting useful information with a collaborative memory module. Then, we employ a meta recommender module to generate private item embeddings and a RP model based on the collaborative vector in the server. To address the challenge of generating a large number of high-dimensional item embeddings, we devise a rise-dimensional generation strategy that first generates a low-dimensional item embedding matrix and a rise-dimensional matrix, and then multiply them to obtain high-dimensional embeddings. We use the generated model to produce private RPs for the given user on her device. MetaMF shows a high capacity even with a small RP model, which can adapt to the limitations of a mobile environment. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets to compare MetaMF with existing MF methods and find that MetaMF can achieve competitive performance. Moreover, we find MetaMF achieves higher RP performance over existing federated methods by better exploiting collaborative filtering among users/devices.
Personalized Reward Learning with Interaction-Grounded Learning (IGL)
Maghakian, Jessica, Mineiro, Paul, Panaganti, Kishan, Rucker, Mark, Saran, Akanksha, Tan, Cheng
In an era of countless content offerings, recommender systems alleviate information overload by providing users with personalized content suggestions. Due to the scarcity of explicit user feedback, modern recommender systems typically optimize for the same fixed combination of implicit feedback signals across all users. However, this approach disregards a growing body of work highlighting that (i) implicit signals can be used by users in diverse ways, signaling anything from satisfaction to active dislike, and (ii) different users communicate preferences in different ways. We propose applying the recent Interaction Grounded Learning (IGL) paradigm to address the challenge of learning representations of diverse user communication modalities. Rather than requiring a fixed, human-designed reward function, IGL is able to learn personalized reward functions for different users and then optimize directly for the latent user satisfaction. We demonstrate the success of IGL with experiments using simulations as well as with real-world production traces. From shopping to reading the news, modern Internet users have access to an overwhelming amount of content and choices from online services. Recommender systems offer a way to improve user experience and decrease information overload by providing a customized selection of content. A key challenge for recommender systems is the rarity of explicit user feedback, such as ratings or likes/dislikes (Grčar et al., 2005). Rather than explicit feedback, practitioners typically use more readily available implicit signals, such as clicks (Hu et al., 2008), webpage dwell time (Yi et al., 2014), or inter-arrival times (Wu et al., 2017) as a proxy signal for user satisfaction. These implicit signals are used as the reward objective in recommender systems, with the popular Click-Through Rate (CTR) metric as the gold standard for the field (Silveira et al., 2019).
Knowledge Enhancement for Contrastive Multi-Behavior Recommendation
Xuan, Hongrui, Liu, Yi, Li, Bohan, Yin, Hongzhi
A well-designed recommender system can accurately capture the attributes of users and items, reflecting the unique preferences of individuals. Traditional recommendation techniques usually focus on modeling the singular type of behaviors between users and items. However, in many practical recommendation scenarios (e.g., social media, e-commerce), there exist multi-typed interactive behaviors in user-item relationships, such as click, tag-as-favorite, and purchase in online shopping platforms. Thus, how to make full use of multi-behavior information for recommendation is of great importance to the existing system, which presents challenges in two aspects that need to be explored: (1) Utilizing users' personalized preferences to capture multi-behavioral dependencies; (2) Dealing with the insufficient recommendation caused by sparse supervision signal for target behavior. In this work, we propose a Knowledge Enhancement Multi-Behavior Contrastive Learning Recommendation (KMCLR) framework, including two Contrastive Learning tasks and three functional modules to tackle the above challenges, respectively. In particular, we design the multi-behavior learning module to extract users' personalized behavior information for user-embedding enhancement, and utilize knowledge graph in the knowledge enhancement module to derive more robust knowledge-aware representations for items. In addition, in the optimization stage, we model the coarse-grained commonalities and the fine-grained differences between multi-behavior of users to further improve the recommendation effect. Extensive experiments and ablation tests on the three real-world datasets indicate our KMCLR outperforms various state-of-the-art recommendation methods and verify the effectiveness of our method.
Dynamic fairness-aware recommendation through multi-agent social choice
Aird, Amanda, Farastu, Paresha, Sun, Joshua, Voida, Amy, Mattei, Nicholas, Burke, Robin
Algorithmic fairness in the context of personalized recommendation presents significantly different challenges to those commonly encountered in classification tasks. Researchers studying classification have generally considered fairness to be a matter of achieving equality of outcomes between a protected and unprotected group, and built algorithmic interventions on this basis. We argue that fairness in real-world application settings in general, and especially in the context of personalized recommendation, is much more complex and multi-faceted, requiring a more general approach. We propose a model to formalize multistakeholder fairness in recommender systems as a two stage social choice problem. In particular, we express recommendation fairness as a novel combination of an allocation and an aggregation problem, which integrate both fairness concerns and personalized recommendation provisions, and derive new recommendation techniques based on this formulation. Simulations demonstrate the ability of the framework to integrate multiple fairness concerns in a dynamic way.
My Epic, Embarrassing, Shockingly Successful Ploy to Get My Friend a Date Using A.I.
"Would you like to go out again?" asked the former woodworker, who likes intense, rambling conversations. "Yes, but first I have to tell you something," said the woman seeking someone to laugh with in the face of life's mysteries. And then she explained that it was not her who'd originally set up her profile and arranged the date--it was ChatGPT. And some woman he'd never met. I am to blame--or to credit, if date No. 2 goes well--for this scenario, which occurred last month in a bar in New York. It was just one of quite a few exchanges that I facilitated, using some supposedly transformative A.I. tools, for a friend who (perhaps unwisely!) had given me the keys to her Tinder and Bumble accounts. Here are some examples of A.I.-generated openers I considered … If you were a vegetable, you'd be a cutecumber. I've been reading a book on anti-gravity lately. It's impossible to put down.
Artificial Intelligence Everyday Life - Tech Spotlight Blog
As artificial intelligence technology advances, what is artificial intelligence and how do we use AI in everyday life? From virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa to personalized shopping recommendations on e-commerce websites to self-driving cars, AI is making our lives more convenient, efficient, and safe. As awareness of its potential benefits increases, AI is increasing daily. Google Search also uses AI in many ways to improve its search functionality. One example is using NLP to understand the intent behind a user's query and provide more relevant results.
We Really Recommend This Podcast Episode
The modern internet is powered by recommendation algorithms. These systems track your online consumption and use that data to suggest the next piece of content for you to absorb. Their goal is to keep users on a platform by presenting them with things they'll spend more time engaging with. Trouble is, those link chains can lead to some weird places, occasionally taking users down dark internet rabbit holes or showing harmful content. Lawmakers and researchers have criticized recommendation systems before, but these methods are under renewed scrutiny now that Google and Twitter are going before the US Supreme Court to defend their algorithmic practices.
The metaverse will be filled with 'elves'
Some say the metaverse is nothing but marketing hype, while others insist it will transform society. I fall into the latter camp, but I'm not talking about cartoon worlds filled with avatars like many are pitching. Instead, I believe the true metaverse – the one that will change society -- will be an augmentation layer on the real world, and within 10 years it will be the foundation of our lives, impacting everything from shopping and socializing to business and education. I also believe that a corporate-controlled metaverse is dangerous to society and requires aggressive regulation. That's because the platform providers will be able to manipulate consumers in ways that will make social media seem quaint.
Creating Synthetic Datasets for Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems using Generative Adversarial Networks
Bobadilla, Jesús, Gutiérrez, Abraham, Yera, Raciel, Martínez, Luis
Research and education in machine learning needs diverse, representative, and open datasets that contain sufficient samples to handle the necessary training, validation, and testing tasks. Currently, the Recommender Systems area includes a large number of subfields in which accuracy and beyond accuracy quality measures are continuously improved. To feed this research variety, it is necessary and convenient to reinforce the existing datasets with synthetic ones. This paper proposes a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based method to generate collaborative filtering datasets in a parameterized way, by selecting their preferred number of users, items, samples, and stochastic variability. This parameterization cannot be made using regular GANs. Our GAN model is fed with dense, short, and continuous embedding representations of items and users, instead of sparse, large, and discrete vectors, to make an accurate and quick learning, compared to the traditional approach based on large and sparse input vectors. The proposed architecture includes a DeepMF model to extract the dense user and item embeddings, as well as a clustering process to convert from the dense GAN generated samples to the discrete and sparse ones, necessary to create each required synthetic dataset. The results of three different source datasets show adequate distributions and expected quality values and evolutions on the generated datasets compared to the source ones. Synthetic datasets and source codes are available to researchers.
GETNext: Trajectory Flow Map Enhanced Transformer for Next POI Recommendation
Yang, Song, Liu, Jiamou, Zhao, Kaiqi
Next POI recommendation intends to forecast users' immediate future movements given their current status and historical information, yielding great values for both users and service providers. However, this problem is perceptibly complex because various data trends need to be considered together. This includes the spatial locations, temporal contexts, user's preferences, etc. Most existing studies view the next POI recommendation as a sequence prediction problem while omitting the collaborative signals from other users. Instead, we propose a user-agnostic global trajectory flow map and a novel Graph Enhanced Transformer model (GETNext) to better exploit the extensive collaborative signals for a more accurate next POI prediction, and alleviate the cold start problem in the meantime. GETNext incorporates the global transition patterns, user's general preference, spatio-temporal context, and time-aware category embeddings together into a transformer model to make the prediction of user's future moves. With this design, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with a large margin and also sheds light on the cold start challenges within the spatio-temporal involved recommendation problems.