Feature interactions can play a crucial role in recommendation systems as they capture complex relationships between user preferences and item characteristics. Existing methods such as Deep & Cross Network (DCNv2) may suffer from high computational requirements due to their cross-layer operations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called blockwise feature interaction (BFI) to help alleviate this issue. By partitioning the feature interaction process into smaller blocks, we can significantly reduce both the memory footprint and the computational burden. Four variants (denoted by P, Q, T, S, respectively) of BFI have been developed and empirically compared. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieves close accuracy compared to the standard DCNv2, while greatly reducing the computational overhead and the number of parameters. This paper contributes to the development of efficient recommendation systems by providing a practical solution for improving feature interaction efficiency.

Log Off Movement CEO Emma Lembke and teacher Matt Miles discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on kids on'The Story.' More people are turning to dating apps to find a match, but one company is taking it a step further by using artificial intelligence (AI) to fuel a more efficient and personalized version of online dating, according to Lior Baruch, the co-founder and CEO AlgoAI Tech. "Maybe it was a website in the past, now it's an app, but it's kind of the same," Baruch told Fox News Digital of the traditional form of online dating. "You go into a website to type few details about yourself, they ask you a few questions, you answer them. You get either one, two, three options, or you see tons of options in front of you that you just choose from, like it's kind of a meat market. If you're not, people can stay there for years and I'm not exaggerating."

Background: People's health depends on the use of proper diet as an important factor. Today, with the increasing mechanization of people's lives, proper eating habits and behaviors are neglected. On the other hand, food recommendations in the field of health have also tried to deal with this issue. But with the introduction of the Western nutrition style and the advancement of Western chemical medicine, many issues have emerged in the field of disease treatment and nutrition. Recent advances in technology and the use of artificial intelligence methods in information systems have led to the creation of recommender systems in order to improve people's health. Methods: A hybrid recommender system including, collaborative filtering, content-based, and knowledge-based models was used. Machine learning models such as Decision Tree, k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), AdaBoost, and Bagging were investigated in the field of food recommender systems on 2519 students in the nutrition management system of a university. Student information including profile information for basal metabolic rate, student reservation records, and selected diet type is received online. Among the 15 features collected and after consulting nutrition experts, the most effective features are selected through feature engineering. Using machine learning models based on energy indicators and food selection history by students, food from the university menu is recommended to students. Results: The AdaBoost model has the highest performance in terms of accuracy with a rate of 73.70 percent. Conclusion: Considering the importance of diet in people's health, recommender systems are effective in obtaining useful information from a huge amount of data. Keywords: Recommender system, Food behavior and habits, Machine learning, Classification

In the recommendation systems, there are multiple business domains to meet the diverse interests and needs of users, and the click-through rate(CTR) of each domain can be quite different, which leads to the demand for CTR prediction modeling for different business domains. The industry solution is to use domain-specific models or transfer learning techniques for each domain. The disadvantage of the former is that the data from other domains is not utilized by a single domain model, while the latter leverage all the data from different domains, but the fine-tuned model of transfer learning may trap the model in a local optimum of the source domain, making it difficult to fit the target domain. Meanwhile, significant differences in data quantity and feature schemas between different domains, known as domain shift, may lead to negative transfer in the process of transferring. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Collaborative Cross-Domain Transfer Learning Framework (CCTL). CCTL evaluates the information gain of the source domain on the target domain using a symmetric companion network and adjusts the information transfer weight of each source domain sample using the information flow network. This approach enables full utilization of other domain data while avoiding negative migration. Additionally, a representation enhancement network is used as an auxiliary task to preserve domain-specific features. Comprehensive experiments on both public and real-world industrial datasets, CCTL achieved SOTA score on offline metrics. At the same time, the CCTL algorithm has been deployed in Meituan, bringing 4.37% CTR and 5.43% GMV lift, which is significant to the business.

Recommendation systems suffer in the strict cold-start (SCS) scenario, where the user-item interactions are entirely unavailable. The ID-based approaches completely fail to work. Cold-start recommenders, on the other hand, leverage item contents to map the new items to the existing ones. However, the existing SCS recommenders explore item contents in coarse-grained manners that introduce noise or information loss. Moreover, informative data sources other than item contents, such as users' purchase sequences and review texts, are ignored. We explore the role of the fine-grained item attributes in bridging the gaps between the existing and the SCS items and pre-train a knowledgeable item-attribute graph for SCS item recommendation. Our proposed framework, ColdGPT, models item-attribute correlations into an item-attribute graph by extracting fine-grained attributes from item contents. ColdGPT then transfers knowledge into the item-attribute graph from various available data sources, i.e., item contents, historical purchase sequences, and review texts of the existing items, via multi-task learning. To facilitate the positive transfer, ColdGPT designs submodules according to the natural forms of the data sources and coordinates the multiple pre-training tasks via unified alignment-and-uniformity losses. Our pre-trained item-attribute graph acts as an implicit, extendable item embedding matrix, which enables the SCS item embeddings to be easily acquired by inserting these items and propagating their attributes' embeddings. We carefully process three public datasets, i.e., Yelp, Amazon-home, and Amazon-sports, to guarantee the SCS setting for evaluation. Extensive experiments show that ColdGPT consistently outperforms the existing SCS recommenders by large margins and even surpasses models that are pre-trained on 75-224 times more, cross-domain data on two out of four datasets.

Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS) is a ubiquitous task in machine learning applications such as recommendation systems. Given a query vector and $n$ atom vectors in $d$-dimensional space, the goal of MIPS is to find the atom that has the highest inner product with the query vector. Existing MIPS algorithms scale at least as $O(\sqrt{d})$, which becomes computationally prohibitive in high-dimensional settings. In this work, we present BanditMIPS, a novel randomized MIPS algorithm whose complexity is independent of $d$. BanditMIPS estimates the inner product for each atom by subsampling coordinates and adaptively evaluates more coordinates for more promising atoms. The specific adaptive sampling strategy is motivated by multi-armed bandits. We provide theoretical guarantees that BanditMIPS returns the correct answer with high probability, while improving the complexity in $d$ from $O(\sqrt{d})$ to $O(1)$. We also perform experiments on four synthetic and real-world datasets and demonstrate that BanditMIPS outperforms prior state-of-the-art algorithms. For example, in the Movie Lens dataset ($n$=4,000, $d$=6,000), BanditMIPS is 20$\times$ faster than the next best algorithm while returning the same answer. BanditMIPS requires no preprocessing of the data and includes a hyperparameter that practitioners may use to trade off accuracy and runtime. We also propose a variant of our algorithm, named BanditMIPS-$\alpha$, which achieves further speedups by employing non-uniform sampling across coordinates. Finally, we demonstrate how known preprocessing techniques can be used to further accelerate BanditMIPS, and discuss applications to Matching Pursuit and Fourier analysis.

Sequential recommendation requires understanding the dynamic patterns of users' behaviors, contexts, and preferences from their historical interactions. Most existing works focus on modeling user-item interactions only from the item level, ignoring that they are driven by latent shopping intentions (e.g., ballpoint pens, miniatures, etc). The detection of the underlying shopping intentions of users based on their historical interactions is a crucial aspect for e-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, to enhance the convenience and efficiency of their customers' shopping experiences. Despite its significance, the area of main shopping intention detection remains under-investigated in the academic literature. To fill this gap, we propose a graph-regularized stochastic Transformer method, G-STO. By considering intentions as sets of products and user preferences as compositions of intentions, we model both of them as stochastic Gaussian embeddings in the latent representation space. Instead of training the stochastic representations from scratch, we develop a global intention relational graph as prior knowledge for regularization, allowing relevant shopping intentions to be distributionally close. Finally, we feed the newly regularized stochastic embeddings into Transformer-based models to encode sequential information from the intention transitions. We evaluate our main shopping intention identification model on three different real-world datasets, where G-STO achieves significantly superior performances to the baselines by 18.08% in Hit@1, 7.01% in Hit@10, and 6.11% in NDCG@10 on average.

Multimedia content is of predominance in the modern Web era. In real scenarios, multiple modalities reveal different aspects of item attributes and usually possess different importance to user purchase decisions. However, it is difficult for models to figure out users' true preference towards different modalities since there exists strong statistical correlation between modalities. Even worse, the strong statistical correlation might mislead models to learn the spurious preference towards inconsequential modalities. As a result, when data (modal features) distribution shifts, the learned spurious preference might not guarantee to be as effective on the inference set as on the training set. We propose a novel MOdality DEcorrelating STable learning framework, MODEST for brevity, to learn users' stable preference. Inspired by sample re-weighting techniques, the proposed method aims to estimate a weight for each item, such that the features from different modalities in the weighted distribution are decorrelated. We adopt Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) as independence testing measure which is a kernel-based method capable of evaluating the correlation degree between two multi-dimensional and non-linear variables. Our method could be served as a play-and-plug module for existing multimedia recommendation backbones. Extensive experiments on four public datasets and four state-of-the-art multimedia recommendation backbones unequivocally show that our proposed method can improve the performances by a large margin.

Google Assistant vanished on many smartwatches when the Wear OS 3 update arrived, leaving just the Pixel Watch and Samsung's newer Galaxy Watches supporting the feature. Thankfully, you no longer have to switch brands just to talk to Google on your wrist. Fossil is rolling out an update this month that adds Assistant to Gen 6 watches running Wear OS 3. This includes both Fossil's own models as well as counterparts from Diesel, Michael Kors and Skagen, although you'll need to be paired with a phone running standard Android with Google apps (Android Go and many Chinese phones won't count). The functionality will be familiar if you've used either Google or Samsung wristwear.

The rise of large-scale socio-technical systems in which humans interact with artificial intelligence (AI) systems (including assistants and recommenders, in short AIs) multiplies the opportunity for the emergence of collective phenomena and tipping points, with unexpected, possibly unintended, consequences. For example, navigation systems' suggestions may create chaos if too many drivers are directed on the same route, and personalised recommendations on social media may amplify polarisation, filter bubbles, and radicalisation. On the other hand, we may learn how to foster the "wisdom of crowds" and collective action effects to face social and environmental challenges. In order to understand the impact of AI on socio-technical systems and design next-generation AIs that team with humans to help overcome societal problems rather than exacerbate them, we propose to build the foundations of Social AI at the intersection of Complex Systems, Network Science and AI. In this perspective paper, we discuss the main open questions in Social AI, outlining possible technical and scientific challenges and suggesting research avenues.