Hongbo Guo

Hongbo Guo, Ruben Naeff, Alex Nikulkov et al.

Bandit learning has been an increasingly popular design choice for recommender system. Despite the strong interest in bandit learning from the community, there remains multiple bottlenecks that prevent many bandit learning approaches from productionalization. One major bottleneck is how to test the effectiveness of bandit algorithm with fairness and without data leakage. Different from supervised learning algorithms, bandit learning algorithms emphasize greatly on the data collection process through their explorative nature. Such explorative behavior may induce unfair evaluation in a classic A/B test setting. In this work, we apply upper confidence bound (UCB) to our large scale short video recommender system and present a test framework for the production bandit learning life-cycle with a new set of metrics. Extensive experiment results show that our experiment design is able to fairly evaluate the performance of bandit learning in the recommender system.

Vasilii Feofanov, Songkang Wen, Marius Alonso et al.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in developing foundation models for time series data that can generalize across diverse downstream tasks. While numerous forecasting-oriented foundation models have been introduced, there is a notable scarcity of models tailored for time series classification. To address this gap, we present Mantis, a new open-source foundation model for time series classification based on the Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture that has been pre-trained using a contrastive learning approach. Our experimental results show that Mantis outperforms existing foundation models both when the backbone is frozen and when fine-tuned, while achieving the lowest calibration error. In addition, we propose several adapters to handle the multivariate setting, reducing memory requirements and modeling channel interdependence.

Zheqing Zhu, Rodrigo de Salvo Braz, Jalaj Bhandari et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a versatile framework for optimizing long-term goals. Although many real-world problems can be formalized with RL, learning and deploying a performant RL policy requires a system designed to address several important challenges, including the exploration-exploitation dilemma, partial observability, dynamic action spaces, and safety concerns. While the importance of these challenges has been well recognized, existing open-source RL libraries do not explicitly address them. This paper introduces Pearl, a Production-Ready RL software package designed to embrace these challenges in a modular way. In addition to presenting benchmarking results, we also highlight examples of Pearl's ongoing industry adoption to demonstrate its advantages for production use cases. Pearl is open sourced on GitHub at github.com/facebookresearch/pearl and its official website is pearlagent.github.io.

Xiaowen Ma, Rongrong Lian, Zhenkai Wu et al.

Remote sensing images usually characterized by complex backgrounds, scale and orientation variations, and large intra-class variance. General semantic segmentation methods usually fail to fully investigate the above issues, and thus their performances on remote sensing image segmentation are limited. In this paper, we propose our LOGCAN++, a semantic segmentation model customized for remote sensing images, which is made up of a Global Class Awareness (GCA) module and several Local Class Awareness (LCA) modules. The GCA module captures global representations for class-level context modeling to reduce the interference of background noise. The LCA module generates local class representations as intermediate perceptual elements to indirectly associate pixels with the global class representations, targeting at dealing with the large intra-class variance problem. In particular, we introduce affine transformations in the LCA module for adaptive extraction of local class representations to effectively tolerate scale and orientation variations in remotely sensed images. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our LOGCAN++ outperforms current mainstream general and remote sensing semantic segmentation methods and achieves a better trade-off between speed and accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/xwmaxwma/rssegmentation.

Hongbo Guo, Xinzi Xu, Hao Wu et al.

Multi-modal biomedical time series (MBTS) data offers a holistic view of the physiological state, holding significant importance in various bio-medical applications. Owing to inherent noise and distribution gaps across different modalities, MBTS can be complex to model. Various deep learning models have been developed to learn representations of MBTS but still fall short in robustness due to the ignorance of modal-to-modal variations. This paper presents a multi-scale and multi-modal biomedical time series representation learning (MBSL) network with contrastive learning to migrate these variations. Firstly, MBTS is grouped based on inter-modal distances, then each group with minimum intra-modal variations can be effectively modeled by individual encoders. Besides, to enhance the multi-scale feature extraction (encoder), various patch lengths and mask ratios are designed to generate tokens with semantic information at different scales and diverse contextual perspectives respectively. Finally, cross-modal contrastive learning is proposed to maximize consistency among inter-modal groups, maintaining useful information and eliminating noises. Experiments against four bio-medical applications show that MBSL outperforms state-of-the-art models by 33.9% mean average errors (MAE) in respiration rate, by 13.8% MAE in exercise heart rate, by 1.41% accuracy in human activity recognition, and by 1.14% F1-score in obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome.

Hongbo Guo, Zheqing Zhu

Contextual bandit learning is increasingly favored in modern large-scale recommendation systems. To better utlize the contextual information and available user or item features, the integration of neural networks have been introduced to enhance contextual bandit learning and has triggered significant interest from both academia and industry. However, a major challenge arises when implementing a disjoint neural contextual bandit solution in large-scale recommendation systems, where each item or user may correspond to a separate bandit arm. The huge number of items to recommend poses a significant hurdle for real world production deployment. This paper focuses on a joint neural contextual bandit solution which serves all recommending items in one single model. The output consists of a predicted reward $μ$, an uncertainty $σ$ and a hyper-parameter $α$ which balances exploitation and exploration, e.g., $μ+ ασ$. The tuning of the parameter $α$ is typically heuristic and complex in practice due to its stochastic nature. To address this challenge, we provide both theoretical analysis and experimental findings regarding the uncertainty $σ$ of the joint neural contextual bandit model. Our analysis reveals that $α$ demonstrates an approximate square root relationship with the size of the last hidden layer $F$ and inverse square root relationship with the amount of training data $N$, i.e., $σ\propto \sqrt{\frac{F}{N}}$. The experiments, conducted with real industrial data, align with the theoretical analysis, help understanding model behaviors and assist the hyper-parameter tuning during both offline training and online deployment.