Hong Zhu

Jiuyang Zhou, Hong Zhu, Xingping Wang

Polyphonic music generation is still a challenge direction due to its correct between generating melody and harmony. Most of the previous studies used RNN-based models. However, the RNN-based models are hard to establish the relationship between long-distance notes. In this paper, we propose a polyphonic music generation neural network named Choir Transformer[ https://github.com/Zjy0401/choir-transformer], with relative positional attention to better model the structure of music. We also proposed a music representation suitable for polyphonic music generation. The performance of Choir Transformer surpasses the previous state-of-the-art accuracy of 4.06%. We also measures the harmony metrics of polyphonic music. Experiments show that the harmony metrics are close to the music of Bach. In practical application, the generated melody and rhythm can be adjusted according to the specified input, with different styles of music like folk music or pop music and so on.

Zhiqiang Zhang, Hong Zhu, Meiyi Xie

Differential privacy (DP), as a promising privacy-preserving model, has attracted great interest from researchers in recent years. Currently, the study on combination of machine learning and DP is vibrant. In contrast, another widely used artificial intelligence technique, the swarm intelligence (SI) algorithm, has received little attention in the context of DP even though it also triggers privacy concerns. For this reason, this paper attempts to combine DP and SI for the first time, and proposes a general differentially private swarm intelligence algorithm framework (DPSIAF). Based on the exponential mechanism, this framework can easily develop existing SI algorithms into the private versions. As examples, we apply the proposed DPSIAF to four popular SI algorithms, and corresponding analyses demonstrate its effectiveness. More interestingly, the experimental results show that, for our private algorithms, their performance is not strictly affected by the privacy budget, and one of the private algorithms even owns better performance than its non-private version in some cases. These findings are different from the conventional cognition, which indicates the uniqueness of SI with DP. Our study may provide a new perspective on DP, and promote the synergy between metaheuristic optimization community and privacy computing community.

Jiuyang Zhou, Tengfei Niu, Hong Zhu et al.

This paper explores the modeling method of polyphonic music sequence. Due to the great potential of Transformer models in music generation, controllable music generation is receiving more attention. In the task of polyphonic music, current controllable generation research focuses on controlling the generation of chords, but lacks precise adjustment for the controllable generation of choral music textures. This paper proposed Condition Choir Transformer (CoCoFormer) which controls the output of the model by controlling the chord and rhythm inputs at a fine-grained level. In this paper, the self-supervised method improves the loss function and performs joint training through conditional control input and unconditional input training. In order to alleviate the lack of diversity on generated samples caused by the teacher forcing training, this paper added an adversarial training method. CoCoFormer enhances model performance with explicit and implicit inputs to chords and rhythms. In this paper, the experiments proves that CoCoFormer has reached the current better level than current models. On the premise of specifying the polyphonic music texture, the same melody can also be generated in a variety of ways.

Heng Chang, Liang Gu, Cheng Hu et al. · salesforce

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) is a task that aims to improve the recommendation performance in a target domain by leveraging the information from source domains. Contrastive learning methods have been widely adopted among intra-domain (intra-CL) and inter-domain (inter-CL) users/items for their representation learning and knowledge transfer during the matching stage of CDR. However, we observe that directly employing contrastive learning on mixed-up intra-CL and inter-CL tasks ignores the difficulty of learning from inter-domain over learning from intra-domain, and thus could cause severe training instability. Therefore, this instability deteriorates the representation learning process and hurts the quality of generated embeddings. To this end, we propose a novel framework named SCCDR built up on a separated intra-CL and inter-CL paradigm and a stop-gradient operation to handle the drawback. Specifically, SCCDR comprises two specialized curriculum stages: intra-inter separation and inter-domain curriculum scheduling. The former stage explicitly uses two distinct contrastive views for the intra-CL task in the source and target domains, respectively. Meanwhile, the latter stage deliberately tackles the inter-CL tasks with a curriculum scheduling strategy that derives effective curricula by accounting for the difficulty of negative samples anchored by overlapping users. Empirical experiments on various open-source datasets and an offline proprietary industrial dataset extracted from a real-world recommender system, and an online A/B test verify that SCCDR achieves state-of-the-art performance over multiple baselines.

Xinhan Di, Pengqian Yu, Danfeng Yang et al.

In this paper, we propose an end-end model for producing furniture layout for interior scene synthesis from the random vector. This proposed model is aimed to support professional interior designers to produce the interior decoration solutions more quickly. The proposed model combines a conditional floor-plan module of the room, a conditional graphical floor-plan module of the room and a conditional layout module. As compared with the prior work on scene synthesis, our proposed three modules enhance the ability of auto-layout generation given the dimensional category of the room. We conduct our experiments on the proposed real-world interior layout dataset that contains $191208$ designs from the professional designers. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed model yields higher-quality layouts in comparison with the state-of-the-art model. The dataset and code are released \href{https://github.com/CODE-SUBMIT/dataset3}{Dataset,Code}

Peijie Sun, Yifan Wang, Min Zhang et al.

With the surge in mobile gaming, accurately predicting user spending on newly downloaded games has become paramount for maximizing revenue. However, the inherently unpredictable nature of user behavior poses significant challenges in this endeavor. To address this, we propose a robust model training and evaluation framework aimed at standardizing spending data to mitigate label variance and extremes, ensuring stability in the modeling process. Within this framework, we introduce a collaborative-enhanced model designed to predict user game spending without relying on user IDs, thus ensuring user privacy and enabling seamless online training. Our model adopts a unique approach by separately representing user preferences and game features before merging them as input to the spending prediction module. Through rigorous experimentation, our approach demonstrates notable improvements over production models, achieving a remarkable \textbf{17.11}\% enhancement on offline data and an impressive \textbf{50.65}\% boost in an online A/B test. In summary, our contributions underscore the importance of stable model training frameworks and the efficacy of collaborative-enhanced models in predicting user spending behavior in mobile gaming.

Chenxu Zhu, Shigang Quan, Bo Chen et al.

CTR prediction plays a vital role in recommender systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been applied in recommender systems due to their emergence abilities. While leveraging semantic information from LLMs has shown some improvements in the performance of recommender systems, two notable limitations persist in these studies. First, LLM-enhanced recommender systems encounter challenges in extracting valuable information from lifelong user behavior sequences within textual contexts for recommendation tasks. Second, the inherent variability in human behaviors leads to a constant stream of new behaviors and irregularly fluctuating user interests. This characteristic imposes two significant challenges on existing models. On the one hand, it presents difficulties for LLMs in effectively capturing the dynamic shifts in user interests within these sequences, and on the other hand, there exists the issue of substantial computational overhead if the LLMs necessitate recurrent calls upon each update to the user sequences. In this work, we propose Lifelong User Behavior Modeling (LIBER) based on large language models, which includes three modules: (1) User Behavior Streaming Partition (UBSP), (2) User Interest Learning (UIL), and (3) User Interest Fusion (UIF). Initially, UBSP is employed to condense lengthy user behavior sequences into shorter partitions in an incremental paradigm, facilitating more efficient processing. Subsequently, UIL leverages LLMs in a cascading way to infer insights from these partitions. Finally, UIF integrates the textual outputs generated by the aforementioned processes to construct a comprehensive representation, which can be incorporated by any recommendation model to enhance performance. LIBER has been deployed on Huawei's music recommendation service and achieved substantial improvements in users' play count and play time by 3.01% and 7.69%.

Shaohua Wu, Xudong Zhao, Tong Yu et al.

Recent work like GPT-3 has demonstrated excellent performance of Zero-Shot and Few-Shot learning on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks by scaling up model size, dataset size and the amount of computation. However, training a model like GPT-3 requires huge amount of computational resources which makes it challengeable to researchers. In this work, we propose a method that incorporates large-scale distributed training performance into model architecture design. With this method, Yuan 1.0, the current largest singleton language model with 245B parameters, achieves excellent performance on thousands GPUs during training, and the state-of-the-art results on NLP tasks. A data processing method is designed to efficiently filter massive amount of raw data. The current largest high-quality Chinese corpus with 5TB high quality texts is built based on this method. In addition, a calibration and label expansion method is proposed to improve the Zero-Shot and Few-Shot performance, and steady improvement is observed on the accuracy of various tasks. Yuan 1.0 presents strong capacity of natural language generation, and the generated articles are difficult to distinguish from the human-written ones.

Chang Liu, Xiaoguang Li, Guohao Cai et al.

Sequential recommender systems aim to model users' evolving interests from their historical behaviors, and hence make customized time-relevant recommendations. Compared with traditional models, deep learning approaches such as CNN and RNN have achieved remarkable advancements in recommendation tasks. Recently, the BERT framework also emerges as a promising method, benefited from its self-attention mechanism in processing sequential data. However, one limitation of the original BERT framework is that it only considers one input source of the natural language tokens. It is still an open question to leverage various types of information under the BERT framework. Nonetheless, it is intuitively appealing to utilize other side information, such as item category or tag, for more comprehensive depictions and better recommendations. In our pilot experiments, we found naive approaches, which directly fuse types of side information into the item embeddings, usually bring very little or even negative effects. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the NOninVasive self-attention mechanism (NOVA) to leverage side information effectively under the BERT framework. NOVA makes use of side information to generate better attention distribution, rather than directly altering the item embedding, which may cause information overwhelming. We validate the NOVA-BERT model on both public and commercial datasets, and our method can stably outperform the state-of-the-art models with negligible computational overheads.

Xinhan Di, Pengqian Yu, Danfeng Yang et al.

In this paper, we propose a multiple-domain model for producing a custom-size furniture layout in the interior scene. This model is aimed to support professional interior designers to produce interior decoration solutions with custom-size furniture more quickly. The proposed model combines a deep layout module, a domain attention module, a dimensional domain transfer module, and a custom-size module in the end-end training. Compared with the prior work on scene synthesis, our proposed model enhances the ability of auto-layout of custom-size furniture in the interior room. We conduct our experiments on a real-world interior layout dataset that contains $710,700$ designs from professional designers. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed model yields higher-quality layouts of custom-size furniture in comparison with the state-of-art model.

Xinhan Di, Pengqian Yu, Hong Zhu et al.

In this paper, we propose an assistive model that supports professional interior designers to produce industrial interior decoration solutions and to meet the personalized preferences of the property owners. The proposed model is able to automatically produce the layout of objects of a particular indoor scene according to property owners' preferences. In particular, the model consists of the extraction of abstract graph, conditional graph generation, and conditional scene instantiation. We provide an interior layout dataset that contains real-world 11000 designs from professional designers. Our numerical results on the dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model compared with the state-of-art methods.

Xinhan Di, Pengqian Yu, Hong Zhu et al.

In this paper, we propose an adversarial model for producing furniture layout for interior scene synthesis when the interior room is rotated. The proposed model combines a conditional adversarial network, a rotation module, a mode module, and a rotation discriminator module. As compared with the prior work on scene synthesis, our proposed three modules enhance the ability of auto-layout generation and reduce the mode collapse during the rotation of the interior room. We conduct our experiments on a proposed real-world interior layout dataset that contains 14400 designs from the professional designers. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed model yields higher-quality layouts for four types of rooms, including the bedroom, the bathroom, the study room, and the tatami room.

Tong Yu, Hong Zhu

Since deep neural networks were developed, they have made huge contributions to everyday lives. Machine learning provides more rational advice than humans are capable of in almost every aspect of daily life. However, despite this achievement, the design and training of neural networks are still challenging and unpredictable procedures. To lower the technical thresholds for common users, automated hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) has become a popular topic in both academic and industrial areas. This paper provides a review of the most essential topics on HPO. The first section introduces the key hyper-parameters related to model training and structure, and discusses their importance and methods to define the value range. Then, the research focuses on major optimization algorithms and their applicability, covering their efficiency and accuracy especially for deep learning networks. This study next reviews major services and toolkits for HPO, comparing their support for state-of-the-art searching algorithms, feasibility with major deep learning frameworks, and extensibility for new modules designed by users. The paper concludes with problems that exist when HPO is applied to deep learning, a comparison between optimization algorithms, and prominent approaches for model evaluation with limited computational resources.

Zifeng Wang, Hong Zhu, Zhenhua Dong et al.

In the time of Big Data, training complex models on large-scale data sets is challenging, making it appealing to reduce data volume for saving computation resources by subsampling. Most previous works in subsampling are weighted methods designed to help the performance of subset-model approach the full-set-model, hence the weighted methods have no chance to acquire a subset-model that is better than the full-set-model. However, we question that how can we achieve better model with less data? In this work, we propose a novel Unweighted Influence Data Subsampling (UIDS) method, and prove that the subset-model acquired through our method can outperform the full-set-model. Besides, we show that overly confident on a given test set for sampling is common in Influence-based subsampling methods, which can eventually cause our subset-model's failure in out-of-sample test. To mitigate it, we develop a probabilistic sampling scheme to control the worst-case risk over all distributions close to the empirical distribution. The experiment results demonstrate our methods superiority over existed subsampling methods in diverse tasks, such as text classification, image classification, click-through prediction, etc.