Beihong Jin

Beibei Li, Yiyuan Zheng, Beihong Jin et al.

Partial-Label Learning (PLL) is a typical problem of weakly supervised learning, where each training instance is annotated with a set of candidate labels. Self-training PLL models achieve state-of-the-art performance but suffer from error accumulation problem caused by mistakenly disambiguated instances. Although co-training can alleviate this issue by training two networks simultaneously and allowing them to interact with each other, most existing co-training methods train two structurally identical networks with the same task, i.e., are symmetric, rendering it insufficient for them to correct each other due to their similar limitations. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an asymmetric dual-task co-training PLL model called AsyCo, which forces its two networks, i.e., a disambiguation network and an auxiliary network, to learn from different views explicitly by optimizing distinct tasks. Specifically, the disambiguation network is trained with self-training PLL task to learn label confidence, while the auxiliary network is trained in a supervised learning paradigm to learn from the noisy pairwise similarity labels that are constructed according to the learned label confidence. Finally, the error accumulation problem is mitigated via information distillation and confidence refinement. Extensive experiments on both uniform and instance-dependent partially labeled datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AsyCo. The code is available at https://github.com/libeibeics/AsyCo.

Jian Dong, Yisong Yu, Yapeng Zhang et al.

User behaviors on an e-commerce app not only contain different kinds of feedback on items but also sometimes imply the cognitive clue of the user's decision-making. For understanding the psychological procedure behind user decisions, we present the behavior path and propose to match the user's current behavior path with historical behavior paths to predict user behaviors on the app. Further, we design a deep neural network for behavior path matching and solve three difficulties in modeling behavior paths: sparsity, noise interference, and accurate matching of behavior paths. In particular, we leverage contrastive learning to augment user behavior paths, provide behavior path self-activation to alleviate the effect of noise, and adopt a two-level matching mechanism to identify the most appropriate candidate. Our model shows excellent performance on two real-world datasets, outperforming the state-of-the-art CTR model. Moreover, our model has been deployed on the Meituan food delivery platform and has accumulated 1.6% improvement in CTR and 1.8% improvement in advertising revenue.

Pengfei Gao, Jingpeng Zhao, Yinglong Ma et al.

Many important classification problems in the real-world consist of a large number of closely related categories in a hierarchical structure or taxonomy. Hierarchical multi-label text classification (HMTC) with higher accuracy over large sets of closely related categories organized in a hierarchy or taxonomy has become a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a hierarchical and fine-tuning approach based on the Ordered Neural LSTM neural network, abbreviated as HFT-ONLSTM, for more accurate level-by-level HMTC. First, we present a novel approach to learning the joint embeddings based on parent category labels and textual data for accurately capturing the joint features of both category labels and texts. Second, a fine tuning technique is adopted for training parameters such that the text classification results in the upper level should contribute to the classification in the lower one. At last, the comprehensive analysis is made based on extensive experiments in comparison with the state-of-the-art hierarchical and flat multi-label text classification approaches over two benchmark datasets, and the experimental results show that our HFT-ONLSTM approach outperforms these approaches, in particular reducing computational costs while achieving superior performance.

Ruiyang Yang, Siheng Li, Beihong Jin

Training multiple agents to perform safe and cooperative control in the complex scenarios of autonomous driving has been a challenge. For a small fleet of cars moving together, this paper proposes Lepus, a new approach to training multiple agents. Lepus adopts a pure cooperative manner for training multiple agents, featured with the shared parameters of policy networks and the shared reward function of multiple agents. In particular, Lepus pre-trains the policy networks via an adversarial process, improving its collaborative decision-making capability and further the stability of car driving. Moreover, for alleviating the problem of sparse rewards, Lepus learns an approximate reward function from expert trajectories by combining a random network and a distillation network. We conduct extensive experiments on the MADRaS simulation platform. The experimental results show that multiple agents trained by Lepus can avoid collisions as many as possible while driving simultaneously and outperform the other four methods, that is, DDPG-FDE, PSDDPG, MADDPG, and MAGAIL(DDPG) in terms of stability.

Yimin Lv, Shuli Wang, Beihong Jin et al.

User behavior sequence modeling plays a significant role in Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction on e-commerce platforms. Except for the interacted items, user behaviors contain rich interaction information, such as the behavior type, time, location, etc. However, so far, the information related to user behaviors has not yet been fully exploited. In the paper, we propose the concept of a situation and situational features for distinguishing interaction behaviors and then design a CTR model named Deep Situation-Aware Interaction Network (DSAIN). DSAIN first adopts the reparameterization trick to reduce noise in the original user behavior sequences. Then it learns the embeddings of situational features by feature embedding parameterization and tri-directional correlation fusion. Finally, it obtains the embedding of behavior sequence via heterogeneous situation aggregation. We conduct extensive offline experiments on three real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DSAIN model. More importantly, DSAIN has increased the CTR by 2.70\%, the CPM by 2.62\%, and the GMV by 2.16\% in the online A/B test. Now, DSAIN has been deployed on the Meituan food delivery platform and serves the main traffic of the Meituan takeout app.

Beibei Li, Beihong Jin, Yisong Yu et al.

Watching micro-videos is becoming a part of public daily life. Usually, user watching behaviors are thought to be rooted in their multiple different interests. In the paper, we propose a model named OPAL for micro-video matching, which elicits a user's multiple heterogeneous interests by disentangling multiple soft and hard interest embeddings from user interactions. Moreover, OPAL employs a two-stage training strategy, in which the pre-train is to generate soft interests from historical interactions under the guidance of orthogonal hyper-categories of micro-videos and the fine-tune is to reinforce the degree of disentanglement among the interests and learn the temporal evolution of each interest of each user. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets. The results show that OPAL not only returns diversified micro-videos but also outperforms six state-of-the-art models in terms of recall and hit rate.

Xinyu Zhang, Beibei Li, Beihong Jin

User interests can be viewed over different time scales, mainly including stable long-term preferences and changing short-term intentions, and their combination facilitates the comprehensive sequential recommendation. However, existing work that focuses on different time scales of user modeling has ignored the negative effects of different time-scale noise, which hinders capturing actual user interests and cannot be resolved by conventional sequential denoising methods. In this paper, we propose a Long- and Short-term Interest Denoising Network (LSIDN), which employs different encoders and tailored denoising strategies to extract long- and short-term interests, respectively, achieving both comprehensive and robust user modeling. Specifically, we employ a session-level interest extraction and evolution strategy to avoid introducing inter-session behavioral noise into long-term interest modeling; we also adopt contrastive learning equipped with a homogeneous exchanging augmentation to alleviate the impact of unintentional behavioral noise on short-term interest modeling. Results of experiments on two public datasets show that LSIDN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models and achieves significant robustness.

Rui Zhao, Beihong Jin, Beibei Li et al.

With the popularity of social media, an increasing number of users are joining group activities on online social platforms. This elicits the requirement of group identification (GI), which is to recommend groups to users. We reveal that users are influenced by both group-level and item-level interests, and these dual-level interests have a collaborative evolution relationship: joining a group expands the user's item interests, further prompting the user to join new groups. Ultimately, the two interests tend to align dynamically. However, existing GI methods fail to fully model this collaborative evolution relationship, ignoring the enhancement of group-level interests on item-level interests, and suffering from false-negative samples when aligning cross-level interests. In order to fully model the collaborative evolution relationship between dual-level user interests, we propose CI4GI, a Collaborative Interest-aware model for Group Identification. Specifically, we design an interest enhancement strategy that identifies additional interests of users from the items interacted with by the groups they have joined as a supplement to item-level interests. In addition, we adopt the distance between interest distributions of two users to optimize the identification of negative samples for a user, mitigating the interference of false-negative samples during cross-level interests alignment. The results of experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that CI4GI significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models.

Wei Zhuo, Kunchi Liu, Taofeng Xue et al.

Interactions between users and videos are the major data source of performing video recommendation. Despite lots of existing recommendation methods, user behaviors on videos, which imply the complex relations between users and videos, are still far from being fully explored. In the paper, we present a model named Sagittarius. Sagittarius adopts a graph convolutional neural network to capture the influence between users and videos. In particular, Sagittarius differentiates between different user behaviors by weighting and fuses the semantics of user behaviors into the embeddings of users and videos. Moreover, Sagittarius combines multiple optimization objectives to learn user and video embeddings and then achieves the video recommendation by the learned user and video embeddings. The experimental results on multiple datasets show that Sagittarius outperforms several state-of-the-art models in terms of recall, unique recall and NDCG.

Hongyin Tang, Xingwu Sun, Beihong Jin et al.

Recently, the retrieval models based on dense representations have been gradually applied in the first stage of the document retrieval tasks, showing better performance than traditional sparse vector space models. To obtain high efficiency, the basic structure of these models is Bi-encoder in most cases. However, this simple structure may cause serious information loss during the encoding of documents since the queries are agnostic. To address this problem, we design a method to mimic the queries on each of the documents by an iterative clustering process and represent the documents by multiple pseudo queries (i.e., the cluster centroids). To boost the retrieval process using approximate nearest neighbor search library, we also optimize the matching function with a two-step score calculation procedure. Experimental results on several popular ranking and QA datasets show that our model can achieve state-of-the-art results.

Xinzhou Dong, Beihong Jin, Wei Zhuo et al.

Many practical recommender systems provide item recommendation for different users only via mining user-item interactions but totally ignoring the rich attribute information of items that users interact with. In this paper, we propose an attribute-augmented graph neural network model named Murzim. Murzim takes as input the graphs constructed from the user-item interaction sequences and corresponding item attribute sequences. By combining the GNNs with node aggregation and an attention network, Murzim can capture user preference patterns, generate embeddings for user-item interaction sequences, and then generate recommendations through next-item prediction. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets. Experimental results show that Murzim outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in terms of recall and MRR, which illustrates that Murzim can make use of item attribute information to produce better recommendations. At present, Murzim has been deployed in MX Player, one of India's largest streaming platforms, and is recommending videos for tens of thousands of users.