Qihang Zhao

Qihang Zhao, Zhongbo Sun, Xiaoyang Zheng et al.

With the rise of modern search and recommendation platforms, insufficient collaborative information of cold-start items exacerbates the Matthew effect of existing platform items, challenging platform diversity and becoming a longstanding issue. Existing methods align items' side content with collaborative information to transfer collaborative signals from high-popularity items to cold-start items. However, these methods fail to account for the asymmetry between collaboration and content, nor the fine-grained differences among items. To address these issues, we propose SMILE, an item representation enhancement approach based on fused alignment of semantic IDs. Specifically, we use RQ-OPQ encoding to quantize item content and collaborative information, followed by a two-step alignment: RQ encoding transfers shared collaborative signals across items, while OPQ encoding learns differentiated information of items. Comprehensive offline experiments on large-scale industrial datasets demonstrate superiority of SMILE, and rigorous online A/B tests confirm statistically significant improvements: item CTR +1.66%, buyers +1.57%, and order volume +2.17%.

Mingzhu Wang, Yuzhe Zhang, Qihang Zhao et al.

Retrieval augmentation is critical when Language Models (LMs) exploit non-parametric knowledge related to the query through external knowledge bases before reasoning. The retrieved information is incorporated into LMs as context alongside the query, enhancing the reliability of responses towards factual questions. Prior researches in retrieval augmentation typically follow a retriever-generator paradigm. In this context, traditional retrievers encounter challenges in precisely and seamlessly extracting query-relevant information from knowledge bases. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel retrieval augmentation framework called ChatLR that primarily employs the powerful semantic understanding ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) as retrievers to achieve precise and concise information retrieval. Additionally, we construct an LLM-based search and question answering system tailored for the financial domain by fine-tuning LLM on two tasks including Text2API and API-ID recognition. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ChatLR in addressing user queries, achieving an overall information retrieval accuracy exceeding 98.8\%.

Qihang Zhao

With the advancement of science and technology, the number of academic papers published in the world each year has increased almost exponentially. While a large number of research papers highlight the prosperity of science and technology, they also give rise to some problems. As we all know, academic papers are the most intuitive embodiment of the research results of scholars, which can reflect the level of researchers. It is also the evaluation standard for decision-making such as promotion and allocation of funds. Therefore, how to measure the quality of an academic paper is very important. The most common standard for measuring academic papers is the number of citation counts of papers, because this indicator is widely used in the evaluation of scientific publications, and it also serves as the basis for many other indicators (such as the h-index). Therefore, it is very important to be able to accurately predict the citation counts of academic papers. This paper proposes an end-to-end deep learning network, DeepCCP, which combines the effect of information cascade and looks at the citation counts prediction problem from the perspective of information cascade prediction. DeepCCP directly uses the citation network formed in the early stage of the paper as the input, and the output is the citation counts of the corresponding paper after a period of time. DeepCCP only uses the structure and temporal information of the citation network, and does not require other additional information, but it can still achieve outstanding performance. According to experiments on 6 real data sets, DeepCCP is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of the accuracy of citation count prediction.