Xin Chen

Tiehua Zhang, Yuze Liu, Zhishu Shen et al.

Spatial-temporal data contains rich information and has been widely studied in recent years due to the rapid development of relevant applications in many fields. For instance, medical institutions often use electrodes attached to different parts of a patient to analyse the electorencephal data rich with spatial and temporal features for health assessment and disease diagnosis. Existing research has mainly used deep learning techniques such as convolutional neural network (CNN) or recurrent neural network (RNN) to extract hidden spatial-temporal features. Yet, it is challenging to incorporate both inter-dependencies spatial information and dynamic temporal changes simultaneously. In reality, for a model that leverages these spatial-temporal features to fulfil complex prediction tasks, it often requires a colossal amount of training data in order to obtain satisfactory model performance. Considering the above-mentioned challenges, we propose an adaptive federated relevance framework, namely FedRel, for spatial-temporal graph learning in this paper. After transforming the raw spatial-temporal data into high quality features, the core Dynamic Inter-Intra Graph (DIIG) module in the framework is able to use these features to generate the spatial-temporal graphs capable of capturing the hidden topological and long-term temporal correlation information in these graphs. To improve the model generalization ability and performance while preserving the local data privacy, we also design a relevance-driven federated learning module in our framework to leverage diverse data distributions from different participants with attentive aggregations of their models.

Xin Chen, Alex Reibman, Sanjay Arora

Timeliness and contextual accuracy of recommendations are increasingly important when delivering contemporary digital marketing experiences. Conventional recommender systems (RS) suggest relevant but time-invariant items to users by accounting for their past purchases. These recommendations only map to customers' general preferences rather than a customer's specific needs immediately preceding a purchase. In contrast, RSs that consider the order of transactions, purchases, or experiences to measure evolving preferences can offer more salient and effective recommendations to customers: Sequential RSs not only benefit from a better behavioral understanding of a user's current needs but also better predictive power. In this paper, we demonstrate and rank the effectiveness of a sequential recommendation system by utilizing a production dataset of over 2.7 million credit card transactions for 46K cardholders. The method first employs an autoencoder on raw transaction data and submits observed transaction encodings to a GRU-based sequential model. The sequential model produces a MAP@1 metric of 47% on the out-of-sample test set, in line with existing research. We also discuss implications for embedding real-time predictions using the sequential RS into Nexus, a scalable, low-latency, event-based digital experience architecture.

Shuaijun Chen, Omid Tavallaie, Niousha Nazemi et al.

As data volumes expand rapidly, distributed machine learning has become essential for addressing the growing computational demands of modern AI systems. However, training models in distributed environments is challenging with participants hold skew, Non-Independent-Identically distributed (Non-IID) data. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offers a promising solution to this problem by personalizing low-rank updates rather than optimizing the entire model, LoRA-enabled distributed learning minimizes computational and maximize personalization for each participant. Enabling more robust and efficient training in distributed learning settings, especially in large-scale, heterogeneous systems. Despite the strengths of current state-of-the-art methods, they often require manual configuration of the initial rank, which is increasingly impractical as the number of participants grows. This manual tuning is not only time-consuming but also prone to suboptimal configurations. To address this limitation, we propose AutoRank, an adaptive rank-setting algorithm inspired by the bias-variance trade-off. AutoRank leverages the MCDA method TOPSIS to dynamically assign local ranks based on the complexity of each participant's data. By evaluating data distribution and complexity through our proposed data complexity metrics, AutoRank provides fine-grained adjustments to the rank of each participant's local LoRA model. This adaptive approach effectively mitigates the challenges of double-imbalanced, non-IID data. Experimental results demonstrate that AutoRank significantly reduces computational overhead, enhances model performance, and accelerates convergence in highly heterogeneous federated learning environments. Through its strong adaptability, AutoRank offers a scalable and flexible solution for distributed machine learning.