Bo Hu

Bo Hu, Tat-Jen Cham

Some group activities, such as team sports and choreographed dances, involve closely coupled interaction between participants. Here we investigate the tasks of inferring and predicting participant behavior, in terms of motion paths and actions, under such conditions. We narrow the problem to that of estimating how a set target participants react to the behavior of other observed participants. Our key idea is to model the spatio-temporal relations among participants in a manner that is robust to error accumulation during frame-wise inference and prediction. We propose a novel Entry-Flipped Transformer (EF-Transformer), which models the relations of participants by attention mechanisms on both spatial and temporal domains. Unlike typical transformers, we tackle the problem of error accumulation by flipping the order of query, key, and value entries, to increase the importance and fidelity of observed features in the current frame. Comparative experiments show that our EF-Transformer achieves the best performance on a newly-collected tennis doubles dataset, a Ceilidh dance dataset, and two pedestrian datasets. Furthermore, it is also demonstrated that our EF-Transformer is better at limiting accumulated errors and recovering from wrong estimations.

Bo Hu, Han Yuan, Vlad Pandelea et al.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has sparked widespread adoption across diverse applications, making robust evaluation frameworks crucial for assessing their performance. While conventional evaluation metrics remain applicable for shorter texts, their efficacy diminishes when evaluating the quality of long-form answers. This limitation is particularly critical in real-world scenarios involving extended questions, extensive context, and long-form answers, such as financial analysis or regulatory compliance. In this paper, we use a practical financial use case to illustrate applications that handle "long question-context-answer triplets". We construct a real-world financial dataset comprising long triplets and demonstrate the inadequacies of traditional metrics. To address this, we propose an effective Extract, Match, and Score (EMS) evaluation approach tailored to the complexities of long-form LLMs' outputs, providing practitioners with a reliable methodology for assessing LLMs' performance in complex real-world scenarios.

Rohan Ramanath, Hakan Inan, Gungor Polatkan et al.

Talent search and recommendation systems at LinkedIn strive to match the potential candidates to the hiring needs of a recruiter or a hiring manager expressed in terms of a search query or a job posting. Recent work in this domain has mainly focused on linear models, which do not take complex relationships between features into account, as well as ensemble tree models, which introduce non-linearity but are still insufficient for exploring all the potential feature interactions, and strictly separate feature generation from modeling. In this paper, we present the results of our application of deep and representation learning models on LinkedIn Recruiter. Our key contributions include: (i) Learning semantic representations of sparse entities within the talent search domain, such as recruiter ids, candidate ids, and skill entity ids, for which we utilize neural network models that take advantage of LinkedIn Economic Graph, and (ii) Deep models for learning recruiter engagement and candidate response in talent search applications. We also explore learning to rank approaches applied to deep models, and show the benefits for the talent search use case. Finally, we present offline and online evaluation results for LinkedIn talent search and recommendation systems, and discuss potential challenges along the path to a fully deep model architecture. The challenges and approaches discussed generalize to any multi-faceted search engine.

Rohan Ramanath, Gungor Polatkan, Liqin Xu et al.

In this paper, we present an architecture executing a complex machine learning model such as a neural network capturing semantic similarity between a query and a document; and deploy to a real-world production system serving 500M+users. We present the challenges that arise in a real-world system and how we solve them. We demonstrate that our architecture provides competitive modeling capability without any significant performance impact to the system in terms of latency. Our modular solution and insights can be used by other real-world search systems to realize and productionize recent gains in neural networks.