Zheng Qin

Wenhui Yu, Zheng Qin

\textbf{G}raph \textbf{C}onvolutional \textbf{N}etwork (\textbf{GCN}) is widely used in graph data learning tasks such as recommendation. However, when facing a large graph, the graph convolution is very computationally expensive thus is simplified in all existing GCNs, yet is seriously impaired due to the oversimplification. To address this gap, we leverage the \textit{original graph convolution} in GCN and propose a \textbf{L}ow-pass \textbf{C}ollaborative \textbf{F}ilter (\textbf{LCF}) to make it applicable to the large graph. LCF is designed to remove the noise caused by exposure and quantization in the observed data, and it also reduces the complexity of graph convolution in an unscathed way. Experiments show that LCF improves the effectiveness and efficiency of graph convolution and our GCN outperforms existing GCNs significantly. Codes are available on \url{https://github.com/Wenhui-Yu/LCFN}.

Yizhe Li, Sanping Zhou, Zheng Qin et al.

Dense video captioning is a challenging task that aims to localize and caption multiple events in an untrimmed video. Recent studies mainly follow the transformer-based architecture to jointly perform the two sub-tasks, i.e., event localization and caption generation, in an end-to-end manner. Based on the general philosophy of detection transformer, these methods implicitly learn the event locations and event semantics, which requires a large amount of training data and limits the model's performance in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel dense video captioning framework, named PR-DETR, which injects the explicit position and relation prior into the detection transformer to improve the localization accuracy and caption quality, simultaneously. On the one hand, we first generate a set of position-anchored queries to provide the scene-specific position and semantic information about potential events as position prior, which serves as the initial event search regions to eliminate the implausible event proposals. On the other hand, we further design an event relation encoder to explicitly calculate the relationship between event boundaries as relation prior to guide the event interaction to improve the semantic coherence of the captions. Extensive ablation studies are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the position and relation prior. Experimental results also show the competitive performance of our method on ActivityNet Captions and YouCook2 datasets.

Wenhui Yu, Zheng Qin

Implicit feedback data is extensively explored in recommendation as it is easy to collect and generally applicable. However, predicting users' preference on implicit feedback data is a challenging task since we can only observe positive (voted) samples and unvoted samples. It is difficult to distinguish between the negative samples and unlabeled positive samples from the unvoted ones. Existing works, such as Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR), sample unvoted items as negative samples uniformly, therefore suffer from a critical noisy-label issue. To address this gap, we design an adaptive sampler based on noisy-label robust learning for implicit feedback data. To formulate the issue, we first introduce Bayesian Point-wise Optimization (BPO) to learn a model, e.g., Matrix Factorization (MF), by maximum likelihood estimation. We predict users' preferences with the model and learn it by maximizing likelihood of observed data labels, i.e., a user prefers her positive samples and has no interests in her unvoted samples. However, in reality, a user may have interests in some of her unvoted samples, which are indeed positive samples mislabeled as negative ones. We then consider the risk of these noisy labels, and propose a Noisy-label Robust BPO (NBPO). NBPO also maximizes the observation likelihood while connects users' preference and observed labels by the likelihood of label flipping based on the Bayes' theorem. In NBPO, a user prefers her true positive samples and shows no interests in her true negative samples, hence the optimization quality is dramatically improved. Extensive experiments on two public real-world datasets show the significant improvement of our proposed optimization methods.

Wenhui Yu, Xiao Lin, Junfeng Ge et al.

Data sparsity is an inherent challenge in the recommender systems, where most of the data is collected from the implicit feedbacks of users. This causes two difficulties in designing effective algorithms: first, the majority of users only have a few interactions with the system and there is no enough data for learning; second, there are no negative samples in the implicit feedbacks and it is a common practice to perform negative sampling to generate negative samples. However, this leads to a consequence that many potential positive samples are mislabeled as negative ones and data sparsity would exacerbate the mislabeling problem. To solve these difficulties, we regard the problem of recommendation on sparse implicit feedbacks as a semi-supervised learning task, and explore domain adaption to solve it. We transfer the knowledge learned from dense data to sparse data and we focus on the most challenging case -- there is no user or item overlap. In this extreme case, aligning embeddings of two datasets directly is rather sub-optimal since the two latent spaces encode very different information. As such, we adopt domain-invariant textual features as the anchor points to align the latent spaces. To align the embeddings, we extract the textual features for each user and item and feed them into a domain classifier with the embeddings of users and items. The embeddings are trained to puzzle the classifier and textual features are fixed as anchor points. By domain adaptation, the distribution pattern in the source domain is transferred to the target domain. As the target part can be supervised by domain adaptation, we abandon negative sampling in target dataset to avoid label noise. We adopt three pairs of real-world datasets to validate the effectiveness of our transfer strategy. Results show that our models outperform existing models significantly.

Wenhui Yu, Zheng Qin

To enhance the performance of the recommender system, side information is extensively explored with various features (e.g., visual features and textual features). However, there are some demerits of side information: (1) the extra data is not always available in all recommendation tasks; (2) it is only for items, there is seldom high-level feature describing users. To address these gaps, we introduce the spectral features extracted from two hypergraph structures of the purchase records. Spectral features describe the \textit{similarity} of users/items in the graph space, which is critical for recommendation. We leverage spectral features to model the users' preference and items' properties by incorporating them into a Matrix Factorization (MF) model. In addition to modeling, we also use spectral features to optimize. Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) is extensively leveraged to optimize models in implicit feedback data. However, in BPR, all missing values are regarded as negative samples equally while many of them are indeed unseen positive ones. We enrich the positive samples by calculating the similarity among users/items by the spectral features. The key ideas are: (1) similar users shall have similar preference on the same item; (2) a user shall have similar perception on similar items. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the usefulness of the spectral features and the effectiveness of our spectrum-enhanced pairwise optimization. Our models outperform several state-of-the-art models significantly.

Wenhui Yu, Xiangnan He, Jian Pei et al.

Visual information plays a critical role in human decision-making process. While recent developments on visually-aware recommender systems have taken the product image into account, none of them has considered the aesthetic aspect. We argue that the aesthetic factor is very important in modeling and predicting users' preferences, especially for some fashion-related domains like clothing and jewelry. This work addresses the need of modeling aesthetic information in visually-aware recommender systems. Technically speaking, we make three key contributions in leveraging deep aesthetic features: (1) To describe the aesthetics of products, we introduce the aesthetic features extracted from product images by a deep aesthetic network. We incorporate these features into recommender system to model users' preferences in the aesthetic aspect. (2) Since in clothing recommendation, time is very important for users to make decision, we design a new tensor decomposition model for implicit feedback data. The aesthetic features are then injected to the basic tensor model to capture the temporal dynamics of aesthetic preferences (e.g., seasonal patterns). (3) We also use the aesthetic features to optimize the learning strategy on implicit feedback data. We enrich the pairwise training samples by considering the similarity among items in the visual space and graph space; the key idea is that a user may likely have similar perception on similar items. We perform extensive experiments on several real-world datasets and demonstrate the usefulness of aesthetic features and the effectiveness of our proposed methods.