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 Personal Assistant Systems


CDR: Conservative Doubly Robust Learning for Debiased Recommendation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recommendation systems (RS), user behavior data is observational rather than experimental, resulting in widespread bias in the data. Consequently, tackling bias has emerged as a major challenge in the field of recommendation systems. Recently, Doubly Robust Learning (DR) has gained significant attention due to its remarkable performance and robust properties. However, our experimental findings indicate that existing DR methods are severely impacted by the presence of so-called Poisonous Imputation, where the imputation significantly deviates from the truth and becomes counterproductive. To address this issue, this work proposes Conservative Doubly Robust strategy (CDR) which filters imputations by scrutinizing their mean and variance. Theoretical analyses show that CDR offers reduced variance and improved tail bounds.In addition, our experimental investigations illustrate that CDR significantly enhances performance and can indeed reduce the frequency of poisonous imputation.


Deep Task-specific Bottom Representation Network for Multi-Task Recommendation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Neural-based multi-task learning (MTL) has gained significant improvement, and it has been successfully applied to recommendation system (RS). Recent deep MTL methods for RS (e.g. MMoE, PLE) focus on designing soft gating-based parameter-sharing networks that implicitly learn a generalized representation for each task. However, MTL methods may suffer from performance degeneration when dealing with conflicting tasks, as negative transfer effects can occur on the task-shared bottom representation. This can result in a reduced capacity for MTL methods to capture task-specific characteristics, ultimately impeding their effectiveness and hindering the ability to generalize well on all tasks. In this paper, we focus on the bottom representation learning of MTL in RS and propose the Deep Task-specific Bottom Representation Network (DTRN) to alleviate the negative transfer problem. DTRN obtains task-specific bottom representation explicitly by making each task have its own representation learning network in the bottom representation modeling stage. Specifically, it extracts the user's interests from multiple types of behavior sequences for each task through the parameter-efficient hypernetwork. To further obtain the dedicated representation for each task, DTRN refines the representation of each feature by employing a SENet-like network for each task. The two proposed modules can achieve the purpose of getting task-specific bottom representation to relieve tasks' mutual interference. Moreover, the proposed DTRN is flexible to combine with existing MTL methods. Experiments on one public dataset and one industrial dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DTRN.


Older Wear OS devices will soon lose Google Assistant support

Engadget

Google will stop supporting Assistant on smartwatches running Wear OS 2 in the near future. "Google Assistant support on this watch is ending soon," reads a message in the latest version of the Wear OS companion app, as spotted by 9to5 Google. "Please upgrade to a newer watch that supports Google Assistant and runs Wear OS 3 or later." The companion app is only needed for devices that use Wear OS 2 or earlier versions of the operating system. There's a dedicated Assistant app for Wear OS 3 devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, Fossil smartwatches and, of course, the Pixel Watch.


I Don't Think My Hookups Need to Know About My Open Relationship

Slate

This is part of Help! Wanted, a special series from Slate advice. In the advising biz, there are certain eternal dilemmas that bedevil letter writers and columnists alike. For this edition, we asked writer Sable Yong to field your questions about online dating. She writes the newsletter Hard Feelings and her first essay collection Die Hot With A Vengeance will be published by Harper Collins in 2024. Matched is a pop-up advice column about online dating. Have a question about navigating dating apps? Can you make a ruling once and for all: If I'm on an app like Tinder or Grindr, and it clearly states I am there for "short-term fun" or "right now," do I really need to also talk about being in an open relationship with potential partners?


Content-based Recommendation Engine for Video Streaming Platform

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recommendation engine suggest content, product or services to the user by using machine learning algorithm. This paper proposed a content-based recommendation engine for providing video suggestion to the user based on their previous interests and choices. We will use TF-IDF text vectorization method to determine the relevance of words in a document. Then we will find out the similarity between each content by calculating cosine similarity between them. Finally, engine will recommend videos to the users based on the obtained similarity score value. In addition, we will measure the engine's performance by computing precision, recall, and F1 core of the proposed system.


Is Meta-Learning the Right Approach for the Cold-Start Problem in Recommender Systems?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recommender systems have become fundamental building blocks of modern online products and services, and have a substantial impact on user experience. In the past few years, deep learning methods have attracted a lot of research, and are now heavily used in modern real-world recommender systems. Nevertheless, dealing with recommendations in the cold-start setting, e.g., when a user has done limited interactions in the system, is a problem that remains far from solved. Meta-learning techniques, and in particular optimization-based meta-learning, have recently become the most popular approaches in the academic research literature for tackling the cold-start problem in deep learning models for recommender systems. However, current meta-learning approaches are not practical for real-world recommender systems, which have billions of users and items, and strict latency requirements. In this paper we show that it is possible to obtaining similar, or higher, performance on commonly used benchmarks for the cold-start problem without using meta-learning techniques. In more detail, we show that, when tuned correctly, standard and widely adopted deep learning models perform just as well as newer meta-learning models. We further show that an extremely simple modular approach using common representation learning techniques, can perform comparably to meta-learning techniques specifically designed for the cold-start setting while being much more easily deployable in real-world applications.


Dating at the end of the world: in Eternights, even the apocalypse can't stand in the way of love

The Guardian

Eternights combines the action-packed spectacle of a PlatinumGames title with a darkly funny dating simulator. At the beginning of the game's Steam demo, you are building an online dating profile with your friend, and a woman texts you to meet up. By the time the demo is over, an apocalyptic calamity has destroyed the city you live in and turned its hapless citizens into mindless demons, and your arm has been cut off and turned into a sword. Oh, and the woman you thought you were going to go on a date with has ulterior motives. Studio Sai founder Jae Yoo worked on the game on nights and weekends while doing a full-time job at Apple, before he eventually left to found his own studio.


Decentralized Graph Neural Network for Privacy-Preserving Recommendation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Building a graph neural network (GNN)-based recommender system without violating user privacy proves challenging. Existing methods can be divided into federated GNNs and decentralized GNNs. But both methods have undesirable effects, i.e., low communication efficiency and privacy leakage. This paper proposes DGREC, a novel decentralized GNN for privacy-preserving recommendations, where users can choose to publicize their interactions. It includes three stages, i.e., graph construction, local gradient calculation, and global gradient passing. The first stage builds a local inner-item hypergraph for each user and a global inter-user graph. The second stage models user preference and calculates gradients on each local device. The third stage designs a local differential privacy mechanism named secure gradient-sharing, which proves strong privacy-preserving of users' private data. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets to validate the consistent superiority of our framework.


Impression-Aware Recommender Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Novel data sources bring new opportunities to improve the quality of recommender systems. Impressions are a novel data source containing past recommendations (shown items) and traditional interactions. Researchers may use impressions to refine user preferences and overcome the current limitations in recommender systems research. The relevance and interest of impressions have increased over the years; hence, the need for a review of relevant work on this type of recommenders. We present a systematic literature review on recommender systems using impressions, focusing on three fundamental angles in research: recommenders, datasets, and evaluation methodologies. We provide three categorizations of papers describing recommenders using impressions, present each reviewed paper in detail, describe datasets with impressions, and analyze the existing evaluation methodologies. Lastly, we present open questions and future directions of interest, highlighting aspects missing in the literature that can be addressed in future works.


Dynamic Embedding Size Search with Minimum Regret for Streaming Recommender System

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the continuous increase of users and items, conventional recommender systems trained on static datasets can hardly adapt to changing environments. The high-throughput data requires the model to be updated in a timely manner for capturing the user interest dynamics, which leads to the emergence of streaming recommender systems. Due to the prevalence of deep learning-based recommender systems, the embedding layer is widely adopted to represent the characteristics of users, items, and other features in low-dimensional vectors. However, it has been proved that setting an identical and static embedding size is sub-optimal in terms of recommendation performance and memory cost, especially for streaming recommendations. To tackle this problem, we first rethink the streaming model update process and model the dynamic embedding size search as a bandit problem. Then, we analyze and quantify the factors that influence the optimal embedding sizes from the statistics perspective. Based on this, we propose the \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{E}mbedding \textbf{S}ize \textbf{S}earch (\textbf{DESS}) method to minimize the embedding size selection regret on both user and item sides in a non-stationary manner. Theoretically, we obtain a sublinear regret upper bound superior to previous methods. Empirical results across two recommendation tasks on four public datasets also demonstrate that our approach can achieve better streaming recommendation performance with lower memory cost and higher time efficiency.