Li Ma

Zhong Zhao, Yanmei Fu, Hanming Liang et al.

In feeds recommendation, the first step is candidate generation. Most of the candidate generation models are based on CTR estimation, which do not consider user's satisfaction with the clicked item. Items with low quality but attractive title (i.e., click baits) may be recommended to the user, which worsens the user experience. One solution to this problem is to model the click and the reading duration simultaneously under the multi-task learning (MTL) framework. There are two challenges in the modeling. The first one is how to deal with the zero duration of the negative samples, which does not necessarily indicate dislikes. The second one is how to perform multi-task learning in the candidate generation model with double tower structure that can only model one single task. In this paper, we propose an distillation based multi-task learning (DMTL) approach to tackle these two challenges. We model duration by considering its dependency of click in the MTL, and then transfer the knowledge learned from the MTL teacher model to the student candidate generation model by distillation. Experiments conducted on dataset gathered from traffic logs of Tencent Kandian's recommender system show that the proposed approach outperforms the competitors significantly in modeling duration, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed candidate generation model.

Cheng Hong, Zhicong Huang, Wen-jie Lu et al.

Machine learning (ML) methods have been widely used in genomic studies. However, genomic data are often held by different stakeholders (e.g. hospitals, universities, and healthcare companies) who consider the data as sensitive information, even though they desire to collaborate. To address this issue, recent works have proposed solutions using Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC), which train on the decentralized data in a way that the participants could learn nothing from each other beyond the final trained model. We design and implement several MPC-friendly ML primitives, including class weight adjustment and parallelizable approximation of activation function. In addition, we develop the solution as an extension to TF Encrypted~\citep{dahl2018private}, enabling us to quickly experiment with enhancements of both machine learning techniques and cryptographic protocols while leveraging the advantages of TensorFlow's optimizations. Our implementation compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods, winning first place in Track IV of the iDASH2019 secure genome analysis competition.