Yu Zheng

Guanyu Lin, Chen Gao, Yu Zheng et al.

In modern recommender systems, sequential recommendation leverages chronological user behaviors to make effective next-item suggestions, which suffers from data sparsity issues, especially for new users. One promising line of work is the cross-domain recommendation, which trains models with data across multiple domains to improve the performance in data-scarce domains. Recent proposed cross-domain sequential recommendation models such as PiNet and DASL have a common drawback relying heavily on overlapped users in different domains, which limits their usage in practical recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a Mixed Attention Network (MAN) with local and global attention modules to extract the domain-specific and cross-domain information. Firstly, we propose a local/global encoding layer to capture the domain-specific/cross-domain sequential pattern. Then we propose a mixed attention layer with item similarity attention, sequence-fusion attention, and group-prototype attention to capture the local/global item similarity, fuse the local/global item sequence, and extract the user groups across different domains, respectively. Finally, we propose a local/global prediction layer to further evolve and combine the domain-specific and cross-domain interests. Experimental results on two real-world datasets (each with two domains) demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model. Further study also illustrates that our proposed method and components are model-agnostic and effective, respectively. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Guanyu-Lin/MAN.

Hongyuan Su, Yu Zheng, Jingtao Ding et al.

The facility location problem (FLP) is a classical combinatorial optimization challenge aimed at strategically laying out facilities to maximize their accessibility. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning method tailored to solve large-scale urban FLP, capable of producing near-optimal solutions at superfast inference speed. We distill the essential swap operation from local search, and simulate it by intelligently selecting edges on a graph of urban regions, guided by a knowledge-informed graph neural network, thus sidestepping the need for heavy computation of local search. Extensive experiments on four US cities with different geospatial conditions demonstrate that our approach can achieve comparable performance to commercial solvers with less than 5\% accessibility loss, while displaying up to 1000 times speedup. We deploy our model as an online geospatial application at https://huggingface.co/spaces/randommmm/MFLP.

Yu Zheng, Chen Gao, Jianxin Chang et al.

Modeling user's long-term and short-term interests is crucial for accurate recommendation. However, since there is no manually annotated label for user interests, existing approaches always follow the paradigm of entangling these two aspects, which may lead to inferior recommendation accuracy and interpretability. In this paper, to address it, we propose a Contrastive learning framework to disentangle Long and Short-term interests for Recommendation (CLSR) with self-supervision. Specifically, we first propose two separate encoders to independently capture user interests of different time scales. We then extract long-term and short-term interests proxies from the interaction sequences, which serve as pseudo labels for user interests. Then pairwise contrastive tasks are designed to supervise the similarity between interest representations and their corresponding interest proxies. Finally, since the importance of long-term and short-term interests is dynamically changing, we propose to adaptively aggregate them through an attention-based network for prediction. We conduct experiments on two large-scale real-world datasets for e-commerce and short-video recommendation. Empirical results show that our CLSR consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art models with significant improvements: GAUC is improved by over 0.01, and NDCG is improved by over 4%. Further counterfactual evaluations demonstrate that stronger disentanglement of long and short-term interests is successfully achieved by CLSR. The code and data are available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/CLSR.

Yu Zheng

The proliferation of artificial intelligence has enabled a diversity of applications that bridge the gap between digital and physical worlds. As physical environments are too complex to model through a single information acquisition approach, it is crucial to fuse multimodal data generated by different sources, such as sensors, devices, systems, and people, to solve a problem in the real world. Unfortunately, it is neither applicable nor sustainable to deploy new resources to collect original data from scratch for every problem. Thus, when data is inadequate in the domain of problem, it is vital to fuse knowledge from multimodal data that is already available in other domains. We call this cross-domain knowledge fusion. Existing research focus on fusing multimodal data in a single domain, supposing the knowledge from different datasets is intrinsically aligned; however, this assumption may not hold in the scenarios of cross-domain knowledge fusion. In this paper, we formally define the cross-domain multimodal data fusion problem, discussing its unique challenges, differences and advantages beyond data fusion in a single domain. We propose a four-layer framework, consisting of Domains, Links, Models and Data layers, answering three key questions:"what to fuse", "why can be fused", and "how to fuse". The Domains Layer selects relevant data from different domains for a given problem. The Links Layer reveals the philosophy of knowledge alignment beyond specific model structures. The Models Layer provides two knowledge fusion paradigms based on the fundamental mechanisms for processing data. The Data Layer turns data of different structures, resolutions, scales and distributions into a consistent representation that can be fed into an AI model. With this framework, we can design solutions that fuse cross-domain multimodal data effectively for solving real-world problems.

Yufeng Ma, Miao Zhao, Yiwei Ding et al.

Multi-branch convolutional neural network architecture has raised lots of attention in speaker verification since the aggregation of multiple parallel branches can significantly improve performance. However, this design is not efficient enough during the inference time due to the increase of model parameters and extra operations. In this paper, we present a new multi-branch network architecture RepSPKNet that uses a re-parameterization technique. With this technique, our backbone model contains an efficient VGG-like inference state while its training state is a complicated multi-branch structure. We first introduce the specific structure of RepVGG into speaker verification and propose several variants of this structure. The performance is evaluated on VoxCeleb-based test sets. We demonstrate that both the branch diversity and the branch capacity play important roles in RepSPKNet designing. Our RepSPKNet achieves state-of-the-art performance with a 1.5982% EER and a 0.1374 minDCF on VoxCeleb1-H.

Zhao Song, David P. Woodruff, Zheng Yu et al.

Kernel methods are fundamental in machine learning, and faster algorithms for kernel approximation provide direct speedups for many core tasks in machine learning. The polynomial kernel is especially important as other kernels can often be approximated by the polynomial kernel via a Taylor series expansion. Recent techniques in oblivious sketching reduce the dependence in the running time on the degree $q$ of the polynomial kernel from exponential to polynomial, which is useful for the Gaussian kernel, for which $q$ can be chosen to be polylogarithmic. However, for more slowly growing kernels, such as the neural tangent and arc-cosine kernels, $q$ needs to be polynomial, and previous work incurs a polynomial factor slowdown in the running time. We give a new oblivious sketch which greatly improves upon this running time, by removing the dependence on $q$ in the leading order term. Combined with a novel sampling scheme, we give the fastest algorithms for approximating a large family of slow-growing kernels.

Yu Zheng, Chen Gao, Liang Chen et al.

These years much effort has been devoted to improving the accuracy or relevance of the recommendation system. Diversity, a crucial factor which measures the dissimilarity among the recommended items, received rather little scrutiny. Directly related to user satisfaction, diversification is usually taken into consideration after generating the candidate items. However, this decoupled design of diversification and candidate generation makes the whole system suboptimal. In this paper, we aim at pushing the diversification to the upstream candidate generation stage, with the help of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). Although GCN based recommendation algorithms have shown great power in modeling complex collaborative filtering effect to improve the accuracy of recommendation, how diversity changes is ignored in those advanced works. We propose to perform rebalanced neighbor discovering, category-boosted negative sampling and adversarial learning on top of GCN. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of our proposed method on diversification. Further ablation studies validate that our proposed method significantly alleviates the accuracy-diversity dilemma.

Jianxin Chang, Chen Gao, Yu Zheng et al.

Sequential recommendation aims to leverage users' historical behaviors to predict their next interaction. Existing works have not yet addressed two main challenges in sequential recommendation. First, user behaviors in their rich historical sequences are often implicit and noisy preference signals, they cannot sufficiently reflect users' actual preferences. In addition, users' dynamic preferences often change rapidly over time, and hence it is difficult to capture user patterns in their historical sequences. In this work, we propose a graph neural network model called SURGE (short for SeqUential Recommendation with Graph neural nEtworks) to address these two issues. Specifically, SURGE integrates different types of preferences in long-term user behaviors into clusters in the graph by re-constructing loose item sequences into tight item-item interest graphs based on metric learning. This helps explicitly distinguish users' core interests, by forming dense clusters in the interest graph. Then, we perform cluster-aware and query-aware graph convolutional propagation and graph pooling on the constructed graph. It dynamically fuses and extracts users' current activated core interests from noisy user behavior sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and proprietary industrial datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains of our proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods. Further studies on sequence length confirm that our method can model long behavioral sequences effectively and efficiently.

Yu Zheng, Chen Gao, Xiangnan He et al.

In recent years, much research effort on recommendation has been devoted to mining user behaviors, i.e., collaborative filtering, along with the general information which describes users or items, e.g., textual attributes, categorical demographics, product images, and so on. Price, an important factor in marketing --- which determines whether a user will make the final purchase decision on an item --- surprisingly, has received relatively little scrutiny. In this work, we aim at developing an effective method to predict user purchase intention with the focus on the price factor in recommender systems. The main difficulties are two-fold: 1) the preference and sensitivity of a user on item price are unknown, which are only implicitly reflected in the items that the user has purchased, and 2) how the item price affects a user's intention depends largely on the product category, that is, the perception and affordability of a user on item price could vary significantly across categories. Towards the first difficulty, we propose to model the transitive relationship between user-to-item and item-to-price, taking the inspiration from the recently developed Graph Convolution Networks (GCN). The key idea is to propagate the influence of price on users with items as the bridge, so as to make the learned user representations be price-aware. For the second difficulty, we further integrate item categories into the propagation progress and model the possible pairwise interactions for predicting user-item interactions. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our GCN-based method in learning the price-aware preference of users. Further analysis reveals that modeling the price awareness is particularly useful for predicting user preference on items of unexplored categories.

Yansong Tang, Dajun Ding, Yongming Rao et al.

There are substantial instructional videos on the Internet, which enables us to acquire knowledge for completing various tasks. However, most existing datasets for instructional video analysis have the limitations in diversity and scale,which makes them far from many real-world applications where more diverse activities occur. Moreover, it still remains a great challenge to organize and harness such data. To address these problems, we introduce a large-scale dataset called "COIN" for COmprehensive INstructional video analysis. Organized with a hierarchical structure, the COIN dataset contains 11,827 videos of 180 tasks in 12 domains (e.g., vehicles, gadgets, etc.) related to our daily life. With a new developed toolbox, all the videos are annotated effectively with a series of step descriptions and the corresponding temporal boundaries. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective method to capture the dependencies among different steps, which can be easily plugged into conventional proposal-based action detection methods for localizing important steps in instructional videos. In order to provide a benchmark for instructional video analysis, we evaluate plenty of approaches on the COIN dataset under different evaluation criteria. We expect the introduction of the COIN dataset will promote the future in-depth research on instructional video analysis for the community.