Bo Long

Xiaojie Guo, Qingkai Zeng, Meng Jiang et al.

Automatic product description generation for e-commerce has witnessed significant advancement in the past decade. Product copywriting aims to attract users' interest and improve user experience by highlighting product characteristics with textual descriptions. As the services provided by e-commerce platforms become diverse, it is necessary to adapt the patterns of automatically-generated descriptions dynamically. In this paper, we report our experience in deploying an E-commerce Prefix-based Controllable Copywriting Generation (EPCCG) system into the JD.com e-commerce product recommendation platform. The development of the system contains two main components: 1) copywriting aspect extraction; 2) weakly supervised aspect labeling; 3) text generation with a prefix-based language model; 4) copywriting quality control. We conduct experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed EPCCG. In addition, we introduce the deployed architecture which cooperates with the EPCCG into the real-time JD.com e-commerce recommendation platform and the significant payoff since deployment.

Haoyu Han, Yu Wang, Harry Shomer et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique that enhances downstream task execution by retrieving additional information, such as knowledge, skills, and tools from external sources. Graph, by its intrinsic "nodes connected by edges" nature, encodes massive heterogeneous and relational information, making it a golden resource for RAG in tremendous real-world applications. As a result, we have recently witnessed increasing attention on equipping RAG with Graph, i.e., GraphRAG. However, unlike conventional RAG, where the retriever, generator, and external data sources can be uniformly designed in the neural-embedding space, the uniqueness of graph-structured data, such as diverse-formatted and domain-specific relational knowledge, poses unique and significant challenges when designing GraphRAG for different domains. Given the broad applicability, the associated design challenges, and the recent surge in GraphRAG, a systematic and up-to-date survey of its key concepts and techniques is urgently desired. Following this motivation, we present a comprehensive and up-to-date survey on GraphRAG. Our survey first proposes a holistic GraphRAG framework by defining its key components, including query processor, retriever, organizer, generator, and data source. Furthermore, recognizing that graphs in different domains exhibit distinct relational patterns and require dedicated designs, we review GraphRAG techniques uniquely tailored to each domain. Finally, we discuss research challenges and brainstorm directions to inspire cross-disciplinary opportunities. Our survey repository is publicly maintained at https://github.com/Graph-RAG/GraphRAG/.

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.

Lingfei Wu, Yu Chen, Kai Shen et al.

Deep learning has become the dominant approach in coping with various tasks in Natural LanguageProcessing (NLP). Although text inputs are typically represented as a sequence of tokens, there isa rich variety of NLP problems that can be best expressed with a graph structure. As a result, thereis a surge of interests in developing new deep learning techniques on graphs for a large numberof NLP tasks. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview onGraph Neural Networks(GNNs) for Natural Language Processing. We propose a new taxonomy of GNNs for NLP, whichsystematically organizes existing research of GNNs for NLP along three axes: graph construction,graph representation learning, and graph based encoder-decoder models. We further introducea large number of NLP applications that are exploiting the power of GNNs and summarize thecorresponding benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and open-source codes. Finally, we discussvarious outstanding challenges for making the full use of GNNs for NLP as well as future researchdirections. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive overview of Graph NeuralNetworks for Natural Language Processing.

Liu Yang, Fabian Paischer, Kaveh Hassani et al.

Sequential dense retrieval models utilize advanced sequence learning techniques to compute item and user representations, which are then used to rank relevant items for a user through inner product computation between the user and all item representations. However, this approach requires storing a unique representation for each item, resulting in significant memory requirements as the number of items grow. In contrast, the recently proposed generative retrieval paradigm offers a promising alternative by directly predicting item indices using a generative model trained on semantic IDs that encapsulate items' semantic information. Despite its potential for large-scale applications, a comprehensive comparison between generative retrieval and sequential dense retrieval under fair conditions is still lacking, leaving open questions regarding performance, and computation trade-offs. To address this, we compare these two approaches under controlled conditions on academic benchmarks and propose LIGER (LeveragIng dense retrieval for GEnerative Retrieval), a hybrid model that combines the strengths of these two widely used methods. LIGER integrates sequential dense retrieval into generative retrieval, mitigating performance differences and enhancing cold-start item recommendation in the datasets evaluated. This hybrid approach provides insights into the trade-offs between these approaches and demonstrates improvements in efficiency and effectiveness for recommendation systems in small-scale benchmarks.

Chiyu Zhang, Yifei Sun, Minghao Wu et al.

Content-based recommendation systems play a crucial role in delivering personalized content to users in the digital world. In this work, we introduce EmbSum, a novel framework that enables offline pre-computations of users and candidate items while capturing the interactions within the user engagement history. By utilizing the pretrained encoder-decoder model and poly-attention layers, EmbSum derives User Poly-Embedding (UPE) and Content Poly-Embedding (CPE) to calculate relevance scores between users and candidate items. EmbSum actively learns the long user engagement histories by generating user-interest summary with supervision from large language model (LLM). The effectiveness of EmbSum is validated on two datasets from different domains, surpassing state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods with higher accuracy and fewer parameters. Additionally, the model's ability to generate summaries of user interests serves as a valuable by-product, enhancing its usefulness for personalized content recommendations.

Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Xi Liu et al.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recommender systems for predicting Click-Through Rates (CTR) necessitates a delicate balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. This paper presents an optimization framework that combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with an innovative multi-head early exit architecture to concurrently enhance both aspects. By integrating Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) as efficient retrieval mechanisms, we are able to significantly reduce data retrieval times while maintaining high model performance. The early exit strategy employed allows for dynamic termination of model inference, utilizing real-time predictive confidence assessments across multiple heads. This not only quickens the responsiveness of LLMs but also upholds or improves their accuracy, making it ideal for real-time application scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate how this architecture effectively decreases computation time without sacrificing the accuracy needed for reliable recommendation delivery, establishing a new standard for efficient, real-time LLM deployment in commercial systems.

Hamid Eghbalzadeh, Yang Wang, Rui Li et al.

Industrial ads ranking systems conventionally rely on labeled impression data, which leads to challenges such as overfitting, slower incremental gain from model scaling, and biases due to discrepancies between training and serving data. To overcome these issues, we propose a Unified framework for Knowledge-Distillation and Semi-supervised Learning (UKDSL) for ads ranking, empowering the training of models on a significantly larger and more diverse datasets, thereby reducing overfitting and mitigating training-serving data discrepancies. We provide detailed formal analysis and numerical simulations on the inherent miscalibration and prediction bias of multi-stage ranking systems, and show empirical evidence of the proposed framework's capability to mitigate those. Compared to prior work, UKDSL can enable models to learn from a much larger set of unlabeled data, hence, improving the performance while being computationally efficient. Finally, we report the successful deployment of UKDSL in an industrial setting across various ranking models, serving users at multi-billion scale, across various surfaces, geological locations, clients, and optimize for various events, which to the best of our knowledge is the first of its kind in terms of the scale and efficiency at which it operates.

Xueying Zhang, Yunjiang Jiang, Yue Shang et al.

We propose a novel domain-specific generative pre-training (DS-GPT) method for text generation and apply it to the product titleand review summarization problems on E-commerce mobile display.First, we adopt a decoder-only transformer architecture, which fitswell for fine-tuning tasks by combining input and output all to-gether. Second, we demonstrate utilizing only small amount of pre-training data in related domains is powerful. Pre-training a languagemodel from a general corpus such as Wikipedia or the CommonCrawl requires tremendous time and resource commitment, andcan be wasteful if the downstream tasks are limited in variety. OurDSGPT is pre-trained on a limited dataset, the Chinese short textsummarization dataset (LCSTS). Third, our model does not requireproduct-related human-labeled data. For title summarization task,the state of art explicitly uses additional background knowledgein training and predicting stages. In contrast, our model implic-itly captures this knowledge and achieves significant improvementover other methods, after fine-tuning on the public Taobao.comdataset. For review summarization task, we utilize JD.com in-housedataset, and observe similar improvement over standard machinetranslation methods which lack the flexibility of fine-tuning. Ourproposed work can be simply extended to other domains for a widerange of text generation tasks.

Hanning Gao, Lingfei Wu, Po Hu et al.

Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) based on information retrieval aims to answer a question by retrieving answer from a large-scale knowledge graph. Most existing methods first roughly retrieve the knowledge subgraphs (KSG) that may contain candidate answer, and then search for the exact answer in the KSG. However, the KSG may contain thousands of candidate nodes since the knowledge graph involved in querying is often of large scale, thus decreasing the performance of answer selection. To tackle this problem, we first propose to partition the retrieved KSG to several smaller sub-KSGs via a new subgraph partition algorithm and then present a graph-augmented learning to rank model to select the top-ranked sub-KSGs from them. Our proposed model combines a novel subgraph matching networks to capture global interactions in both question and subgraphs, and an Enhanced Bilateral Multi-Perspective Matching model is proposed to capture local interactions. Finally, we apply an answer selection model on the full KSG and the top-ranked sub-KSGs respectively to validate the effectiveness of our proposed graph-augmented learning to rank method. The experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.

Yangkai Du, Tengfei Ma, Lingfei Wu et al.

Contrastive Learning has emerged as a powerful representation learning method and facilitates various downstream tasks especially when supervised data is limited. How to construct efficient contrastive samples through data augmentation is key to its success. Unlike vision tasks, the data augmentation method for contrastive learning has not been investigated sufficiently in language tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to construct contrastive samples for language tasks using text summarization. We use these samples for supervised contrastive learning to gain better text representations which greatly benefit text classification tasks with limited annotations. To further improve the method, we mix up samples from different classes and add an extra regularization, named Mixsum, in addition to the cross-entropy-loss. Experiments on real-world text classification datasets (Amazon-5, Yelp-5, AG News, and IMDb) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive learning framework with summarization-based data augmentation and Mixsum regularization.