Yu Hirate

Pablo Loyola, Kento Hasegawa, Andres Hoyos-Idobro et al.

While Annealing Machines (AM) have shown increasing capabilities in solving complex combinatorial problems, positioning themselves as a more immediate alternative to the expected advances of future fully quantum solutions, there are still scaling limitations. In parallel, Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been recently adapted to solve combinatorial problems, showing competitive results and potentially high scalability due to their distributed nature. We propose a merging approach that aims at retaining both the accuracy exhibited by AMs and the representational flexibility and scalability of GNNs. Our model considers a compression step, followed by a supervised interaction where partial solutions obtained from the AM are used to guide local GNNs from where node feature representations are obtained and combined to initialize an additional GNN-based solver that handles the original graph's target problem. Intuitively, the AM can solve the combinatorial problem indirectly by infusing its knowledge into the GNN. Experiments on canonical optimization problems show that the idea is feasible, effectively allowing the AM to solve size problems beyond its original limits.

Masaki Oguni, Yohei Seki, Yu Hirate

In user-generated recipe websites, users post their-original recipes. Some recipes, however, are very similar in major components such as the cooking instructions to other recipes. We refer to such recipes as "near-duplicate recipes". In this study, we propose a method that extends the "Word Mover's Distance", which calculates distances between texts based on word embedding, to character 3-gram embedding. Using a corpus of over 1.21 million recipes, we learned the word embedding and the character 3-gram embedding by using a Skip-Gram model with negative sampling and fastText to extract candidate pairs of near-duplicate recipes. We then annotated these candidates and evaluated the proposed method against a comparison method. Our results demonstrated that near-duplicate recipes that were not detected by the comparison method were successfully detected by the proposed method.

Tianyu Li, Chien-Chih Wang, Yukun Ma et al.

Existing algorithms aiming to learn a binary classifier from positive (P) and unlabeled (U) data generally require estimating the class prior or label noises ahead of building a classification model. However, the estimation and classifier learning are normally conducted in a pipeline instead of being jointly optimized. In this paper, we propose to alternatively train the two steps using reinforcement learning. Our proposal adopts a policy network to adaptively make assumptions on the labels of unlabeled data, while a classifier is built upon the output of the policy network and provides rewards to learn a better strategy. The dynamic and interactive training between the policy maker and the classifier can exploit the unlabeled data in a more effective manner and yield a significant improvement on the classification performance. Furthermore, we present two different approaches to represent the actions sampled from the policy. The first approach considers continuous actions as soft labels, while the other uses discrete actions as hard assignment of labels for unlabeled examples.We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on two benchmark datasets as well as one e-commerce dataset. The result shows the proposed method is able to consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods in various settings.

Tianyu Li, Yukun Ma, Jiu Xu et al.

This paper leverages heterogeneous auxiliary information to address the data sparsity problem of recommender systems. We propose a model that learns a shared feature space from heterogeneous data, such as item descriptions, product tags and online purchase history, to obtain better predictions. Our model consists of autoencoders, not only for numerical and categorical data, but also for sequential data, which enables capturing user tastes, item characteristics and the recent dynamics of user preference. We learn the autoencoder architecture for each data source independently in order to better model their statistical properties. Our evaluation on two MovieLens datasets and an e-commerce dataset shows that mean average precision and recall improve over state-of-the-art methods.