Abhishek Srivastava

Johannes Kruse, Kasper Lindskow, Saikishore Kalloori et al.

The RecSys Challenge 2024 aims to advance news recommendation by addressing both the technical and normative challenges inherent in designing effective and responsible recommender systems for news publishing. This paper describes the challenge, including its objectives, problem setting, and the dataset provided by the Danish news publishers Ekstra Bladet and JP/Politikens Media Group ("Ekstra Bladet"). The challenge explores the unique aspects of news recommendation, such as modeling user preferences based on behavior, accounting for the influence of the news agenda on user interests, and managing the rapid decay of news items. Additionally, the challenge embraces normative complexities, investigating the effects of recommender systems on news flow and their alignment with editorial values. We summarize the challenge setup, dataset characteristics, and evaluation metrics. Finally, we announce the winners and highlight their contributions. The dataset is available at: https://recsys.eb.dk.

Yi Yu, Abhishek Srivastava, Rajiv Ratn Shah

Conditional sequence generation aims to instruct the generation procedure by conditioning the model with additional context information, which is a self-supervised learning issue (a form of unsupervised learning with supervision information from data itself). Unfortunately, the current state-of-the-art generative models have limitations in sequence generation with multiple attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel conditional hybrid GAN (C-Hybrid-GAN) to solve this issue. Discrete sequence with triplet attributes are separately generated when conditioned on the same context. Most importantly, relational reasoning technique is exploited to model not only the dependency inside each sequence of the attribute during the training of the generator but also the consistency among the sequences of attributes during the training of the discriminator. To avoid the non-differentiability problem in GANs encountered during discrete data generation, we exploit the Gumbel-Softmax technique to approximate the distribution of discrete-valued sequences.Through evaluating the task of generating melody (associated with note, duration, and rest) from lyrics, we demonstrate that the proposed C-Hybrid-GAN outperforms the existing methods in context-conditioned discrete-valued sequence generation.