Traditional recommender systems leverage users' item preference history to recommend novel content that users may like. However, modern dialog interfaces that allow users to express language-based preferences offer a fundamentally different modality for preference input. Inspired by recent successes of prompting paradigms for large language models (LLMs), we study their use for making recommendations from both item-based and language-based preferences in comparison to state-of-the-art item-based collaborative filtering (CF) methods. To support this investigation, we collect a new dataset consisting of both item-based and language-based preferences elicited from users along with their ratings on a variety of (biased) recommended items and (unbiased) random items. Among numerous experimental results, we find that LLMs provide competitive recommendation performance for pure language-based preferences (no item preferences) in the near cold-start case in comparison to item-based CF methods, despite having no supervised training for this specific task (zero-shot) or only a few labels (few-shot). This is particularly promising as language-based preference representations are more explainable and scrutable than item-based or vector-based representations.
NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content, in the context of a dialogue, can have severe side effects on users in open-domain dialogue systems. However, research on detecting NSFW language, especially sexually explicit content, within a dialogue context has significantly lagged behind. To address this issue, we introduce CensorChat, a dialogue monitoring dataset aimed at NSFW dialogue detection. Leveraging knowledge distillation techniques involving GPT-4 and ChatGPT, this dataset offers a cost-effective means of constructing NSFW content detectors. The process entails collecting real-life human-machine interaction data and breaking it down into single utterances and single-turn dialogues, with the chatbot delivering the final utterance. ChatGPT is employed to annotate unlabeled data, serving as a training set. Rationale validation and test sets are constructed using ChatGPT and GPT-4 as annotators, with a self-criticism strategy for resolving discrepancies in labeling. A BERT model is fine-tuned as a text classifier on pseudo-labeled data, and its performance is assessed. The study emphasizes the importance of AI systems prioritizing user safety and well-being in digital conversations while respecting freedom of expression. The proposed approach not only advances NSFW content detection but also aligns with evolving user protection needs in AI-driven dialogues.
In modern commercial search engines and recommendation systems, data from multiple domains is available to jointly train the multi-domain model. Traditional methods train multi-domain models in the multi-task setting, with shared parameters to learn the similarity of multiple tasks, and task-specific parameters to learn the divergence of features, labels, and sample distributions of individual tasks. With the development of large language models, LLM can extract global domain-invariant text features that serve both search and recommendation tasks. We propose a novel framework called S\&R Multi-Domain Foundation, which uses LLM to extract domain invariant features, and Aspect Gating Fusion to merge the ID feature, domain invariant text features and task-specific heterogeneous sparse features to obtain the representations of query and item. Additionally, samples from multiple search and recommendation scenarios are trained jointly with Domain Adaptive Multi-Task module to obtain the multi-domain foundation model. We apply the S\&R Multi-Domain foundation model to cold start scenarios in the pretrain-finetune manner, which achieves better performance than other SOTA transfer learning methods. The S\&R Multi-Domain Foundation model has been successfully deployed in Alipay Mobile Application's online services, such as content query recommendation and service card recommendation, etc.
Large language models (LLMs) have been successfully adapted for interactive decision-making tasks like web navigation. While achieving decent performance, previous methods implicitly assume a forward-only execution mode for the model, where they only provide oracle trajectories as in-context examples to teach the model how to reason in the interactive environment. Consequently, the model could not handle more challenging scenarios not covered in the in-context examples, e.g., mistakes, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose to model the interactive task as state space exploration, where the LLM agent transitions among a pre-defined set of states by performing actions to complete the task. This formulation enables flexible back-tracking, allowing the model to easily recover from errors. We evaluate our proposed LLM Agent with State-Space ExploRation (LASER) on the WebShop task. Experimental results show that our LASER agent significantly outperforms previous methods and closes the gap with human performance on the web navigation task.
Transformer-based models excel in speech recognition. Existing efforts to optimize Transformer inference, typically for long-context applications, center on simplifying attention score calculations. However, streaming speech recognition models usually process a limited number of tokens each time, making attention score calculation less of a bottleneck. Instead, the bottleneck lies in the linear projection layers of multi-head attention and feedforward networks, constituting a substantial portion of the model size and contributing significantly to computation, memory, and power usage. To address this bottleneck, we propose folding attention, a technique targeting these linear layers, significantly reducing model size and improving memory and power efficiency. Experiments on on-device Transformer-based streaming speech recognition models show that folding attention reduces model size (and corresponding memory consumption) by up to 24% and power consumption by up to 23%, all without compromising model accuracy or computation overhead.
A recommendation system assists users in finding items that are relevant to them. Existing recommendation models are primarily based on predicting relationships between users and items and use complex matching models or incorporate extensive external information to capture association patterns in data. However, recommendation is not only a problem of inductive statistics using data; it is also a cognitive task of reasoning decisions based on knowledge extracted from information. Hence, a logic system could naturally be incorporated for the reasoning in a recommendation task. However, although hard-rule approaches based on logic systems can provide powerful reasoning ability, they struggle to cope with inconsistent and incomplete knowledge in real-world tasks, especially for complex tasks such as recommendation. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic recommendation model, which transforms the user history interactions into a logic expression and then transforms the recommendation prediction into a query task based on this logic expression. The logic expressions are then computed based on the modular logic operations of the neural network. We also construct an implicit logic encoder to reasonably reduce the complexity of the logic computation. Finally, a user's interest items can be queried in the vector space based on the computation results. Experiments on three well-known datasets verified that our method performs better compared to state of the art shallow, deep, session, and reasoning models.
Recognizing novel sub-categories with scarce samples is an essential and challenging research topic in computer vision. Existing literature addresses this challenge by employing local-based representation approaches, which may not sufficiently facilitate meaningful object-specific semantic understanding, leading to a reliance on apparent background correlations. Moreover, they primarily rely on high-dimensional local descriptors to construct complex embedding space, potentially limiting the generalization. To address the above challenges, this article proposes a novel model called RSaG for few-shot fine-grained visual recognition. RSaG introduces additional saliency-aware supervision via saliency detection to guide the model toward focusing on the intrinsic discriminative regions. Specifically, RSaG utilizes the saliency detection model to emphasize the critical regions of each sub-category, providing additional object-specific information for fine-grained prediction. RSaG transfers such information with two symmetric branches in a mutual learning paradigm. Furthermore, RSaG exploits inter-regional relationships to enhance the informativeness of the representation and subsequently summarize the highlighted details into contextual embeddings to facilitate the effective transfer, enabling quick generalization to novel sub-categories. The proposed approach is empirically evaluated on three widely used benchmarks, demonstrating its superior performance.
Attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) speech recognition model has been widely successful in recent years. However, the joint optimization of acoustic model and language model in end-to-end manner has created challenges for text adaptation. In particular, effectively, quickly and inexpensively adapting text has become a primary concern for deploying AED systems in industry. To address this issue, we propose a novel model, the hybrid attention-based encoder-decoder (HAED) speech recognition model that preserves the modularity of conventional hybrid automatic speech recognition systems. Our HAED model separates the acoustic and language models, allowing for the use of conventional text-based language model adaptation techniques. We demonstrate that the proposed HAED model yields 21\% Word Error Rate (WER) improvements in relative when out-of-domain text data is used for language model adaptation, and with only a minor degradation in WER on a general test set compared with conventional AED model.
Sequential recommendation (SR) is to accurately recommend a list of items for a user based on her current accessed ones. While new-coming users continuously arrive in the real world, one crucial task is to have inductive SR that can produce embeddings of users and items without re-training. Given user-item interactions can be extremely sparse, another critical task is to have transferable SR that can transfer the knowledge derived from one domain with rich data to another domain. In this work, we aim to present the holistic SR that simultaneously accommodates conventional, inductive, and transferable settings. We propose a novel deep learning-based model, Relational Temporal Attentive Graph Neural Networks (RetaGNN), for holistic SR. The main idea of RetaGNN is three-fold. First, to have inductive and transferable capabilities, we train a relational attentive GNN on the local subgraph extracted from a user-item pair, in which the learnable weight matrices are on various relations among users, items, and attributes, rather than nodes or edges. Second, long-term and short-term temporal patterns of user preferences are encoded by a proposed sequential self-attention mechanism. Third, a relation-aware regularization term is devised for better training of RetaGNN. Experiments conducted on MovieLens, Instagram, and Book-Crossing datasets exhibit that RetaGNN can outperform state-of-the-art methods under conventional, inductive, and transferable settings. The derived attention weights also bring model explainability.
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend high-quality items to users through interactive conversations. Although several efforts have been made for CRS, two major issues still remain to be solved. First, the conversation data itself lacks of sufficient contextual information for accurately understanding users' preference. Second, there is a semantic gap between natural language expression and item-level user preference. To address these issues, we incorporate both word-oriented and entity-oriented knowledge graphs (KG) to enhance the data representations in CRSs, and adopt Mutual Information Maximization to align the word-level and entity-level semantic spaces. Based on the aligned semantic representations, we further develop a KG-enhanced recommender component for making accurate recommendations, and a KG-enhanced dialog component that can generate informative keywords or entities in the response text. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in yielding better performance on both recommendation and conversation tasks.
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.