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Graph Convolution Network based Recommender Systems: Learning Guarantee and Item Mixture Powered Strategy

Neural Information Processing Systems

Inspired by their powerful representation ability on graph-structured data, Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied to recommender systems, and have shown superior performance. Despite their empirical success, there is a lack of theoretical explorations such as generalization properties. In this paper, we take a first step towards establishing a generalization guarantee for GCN-based recommendation models under inductive and transductive learning. We mainly investigate the roles of graph normalization and non-linear activation, providing some theoretical understanding, and construct extensive experiments to further verify these findings empirically. Furthermore, based on the proven generalization bound and the challenge of existing models in discrete data learning, we propose Item Mixture (IMix) to enhance recommendation. It models discrete spaces in a continuous manner by mixing the embeddings of positive-negative item pairs, and its effectiveness can be strictly guaranteed from empirical and theoretical aspects.


1680e9fa7b4dd5d62ece800239bb53bd-Supplemental.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

We analyze here briefly some basic notions of the geometry of the sphere that we use in our algorithm and convergence analysis. We refer the reader to [1, p. 73-76] for a more comprehensive presentation. Tangent Space: The tangent space of the r-dimensional sphere Sr at a point p is an r-dimensional vector space, which generalizes the notion of tangent plane in two dimensions. We denote it by TpSr and a vector v belongs in it, if and only if, it can be written as ฮฑ(0), where ฮฑ: ( ฮต,ฮต) Sr (for some ฮต > 0) is a smooth curve with ฮฑ(0) = p. The tangent space at pcan be given also in an explicit way, as the set of all vectors in Rr+1 orthogonal to p with respect to the usual inner product.


Distributed Principal Component Analysis with Limited Communication

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study efficient distributed algorithms for the fundamental problem of principal component analysis and leading eigenvector computation on the sphere, when the data are randomly distributed among a set of computational nodes. We propose a new quantized variant of Riemannian gradient descent to solve this problem, and prove that the algorithm converges with high probability under a set of necessary spherical-convexity properties. We give bounds on the number of bits transmitted by the algorithm under common initialization schemes, and investigate the dependency on the problem dimension in each case.


Trump's DOJ Indicted the SPLC. His Supporters Are Already Looking for the Next Target.

Mother Jones

His Supporters Are Already Looking for the Next Target. "Grok has thoughts on who to look at next." Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel hold a press conference on their prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center on April 21, 2026. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. The Justice Department this week announced criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleging that the longtime civil rights watchdog had defrauded its own donors by secretly paying large sums of money to informants within various hate groups.


MetaAvatar: Learning Animatable Clothed Human Models from Few Depth Images

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we aim to create generalizable and controllable neural signed distance fields (SDFs) that represent clothed humans from monocular depth observations. Recent advances in deep learning, especially neural implicit representations, have enabled human shape reconstruction and controllable avatar generation from different sensor inputs. However, to generate realistic cloth deformations from novel input poses, watertight meshes or dense full-body scans are usually needed as inputs. Furthermore, due to the difficulty of effectively modeling pose-dependent cloth deformations for diverse body shapes and cloth types, existing approaches resort to per-subject/cloth-type optimization from scratch, which is computationally expensive. In contrast, we propose an approach that can quickly generate realistic clothed human avatars, represented as controllable neural SDFs, given only monocular depth images.


18ddfb199d71a8a24f83abc1ced077b7-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for training agents that are capable of solving multiple tasks and reach a diverse set of objectives. How to specify and ground these goals in such a way that we can both reliably reach goals during training as well as generalize to new goals during evaluation remains an open area of research. Defining goals in the space of noisy and high-dimensional sensory inputs poses a challenge for training goal-conditioned agents, or even for generalization to novel goals. We propose to address this by learning factorial representations of goals and processing the resulting representation via a discretization bottleneck, for coarser goal specification, through an approach we call DGRL. We show that applying a discretizing bottleneck can improve performance in goal-conditioned RL setups, by experimentally evaluating this method on tasks ranging from maze environments to complex robotic navigation and manipulation. Additionally, we prove a theorem lower-bounding the expected return on out-of-distribution goals, while still allowing for specifying goals with expressive combinatorial structure.


Counting Distinct Elements in the Turnstile Model with Differential Privacy under Continual Observation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Privacy is a central challenge for systems that learn from sensitive data sets, especially when a system's outputs must be continuously updated to reflect changing data. We consider the achievable error for differentially private continual release of a basic statistic--the number of distinct items--in a stream where items may be both inserted and deleted (the turnstile model). With only insertions, existing algorithms have additive error just polylogarithmic in the length of the stream T. We uncover a much richer landscape in the turnstile model, even without considering memory restrictions. We show that every differentially private mechanism that handles insertions and deletions has worst-case additive error at least T1/4 even under a relatively weak, event-level privacy definition. Then, we identify a parameter of the input stream, its maximum flippancy, that is low for natural data streams and for which we give tight parameterized error guarantees. Specifically, the maximum flippancy is the largest number of times that the contribution of a single item to the distinct elements count changes over the course of the stream. We present an item-level differentially private mechanism that, for all turnstile streams with maximum flippancy w, continually outputs the number of distinct elements with an O( p w polylogT) additive error, without requiring prior knowledge of w. We prove that this is the best achievable error bound that depends only on w, for a large range of values of w. When w is small, the error of our mechanism is similar to the polylogarithmic in T error in the insertion-only setting, bypassing the hardness in the turnstile model.