Ricky Chen

Fabian Paischer, Liu Yang, Linfeng Liu et al.

In sequential recommendation, models recommend items based on user's interaction history. To this end, current models usually incorporate information such as item descriptions and user intent or preferences. User preferences are usually not explicitly given in open-source datasets, and thus need to be approximated, for example via large language models (LLMs). Current approaches leverage approximated user preferences only during training and rely solely on the past interaction history for recommendations, limiting their ability to dynamically adapt to changing preferences, potentially reinforcing echo chambers. To address this issue, we propose a new paradigm, namely preference discerning, which explicitly conditions a generative recommendation model on user preferences in natural language within its context. To evaluate preference discerning, we introduce a novel benchmark that provides a holistic evaluation across various scenarios, including preference steering and sentiment following. Upon evaluating current state-of-the-art methods on our benchmark, we discover that their ability to dynamically adapt to evolving user preferences is limited. To address this, we propose a new method named Mender ($\textbf{M}$ultimodal Prefer$\textbf{en}$ce $\textbf{D}$iscern$\textbf{er}$), which achieves state-of-the-art performance in our benchmark. Our results show that Mender effectively adapts its recommendation guided by human preferences, even if not observed during training, paving the way toward more flexible recommendation models.

Ricky Chen, Timothy T. Yu, Gavin Xu et al.

With the FDA approval of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for point-of-care clinical diagnoses, model generalizability is of the utmost importance as clinical decision-making must be domain-agnostic. A method of tackling the problem is to increase the dataset to include images from a multitude of domains; while this technique is ideal, the security requirements of medical data is a major limitation. Additionally, researchers with developed tools benefit from the addition of open-sourced data, but are limited by the difference in domains. Herewith, we investigated the implementation of a Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks (CycleGAN) for the domain adaptation of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) volumes. This study was done in collaboration with the Biomedical Optics Research Group and Functional & Anatomical Imaging & Shape Analysis Lab at Simon Fraser University. In this study, we investigated a learning-based approach of adapting the domain of a publicly available dataset, UK Biobank dataset (UKB). To evaluate the performance of domain adaptation, we utilized pre-existing retinal layer segmentation tools developed on a different set of RETOUCH OCT data. This study provides insight on state-of-the-art tools for domain adaptation compared to traditional processing techniques as well as a pipeline for adapting publicly available retinal data to the domains previously used by our collaborators.