Online platforms have a wealth of data, run countless experiments and use industrial-scale algorithms to optimize user experience. Despite this, many users seem to regret the time they spend on these platforms. One possible explanation is misaligned incentives: platforms are not optimizing for user happiness. We suggest the problem runs deeper, transcending the specific incentives of any particular platform, and instead stems from a mistaken foundational assumption: To understand what users want, platforms look at what users do. Yet research has demonstrated, and personal experience affirms, that we often make choices in the moment that are inconsistent with what we actually want. In this work, we develop a model of media consumption where users have inconsistent preferences. We consider a platform which simply wants to maximize user utility, but only observes user engagement. We show how our model of users' preference inconsistencies produces phenomena that are familiar from everyday experience, but difficult to capture in traditional user interaction models. A key ingredient in our model is a formulation for how platforms determine what to show users: they optimize over a large set of potential content (the content manifold) parametrized by underlying features of the content. Whether improving engagement improves user welfare depends on the direction of movement in the content manifold: for certain directions of change, increasing engagement makes users less happy, while in other directions, increasing engagement makes users happier. We characterize the structure of content manifolds for which increasing engagement fails to increase user utility. By linking these effects to abstractions of platform design choices, our model thus creates a theoretical framework and vocabulary in which to explore interactions between design, behavioral science, and social media.
Despite their tremendous success in many applications, large language models often fall short of consistent reasoning and planning in various (language, embodied, and social) scenarios, due to inherent limitations in their inference, learning, and modeling capabilities. In this position paper, we present a new perspective of machine reasoning, LAW, that connects the concepts of Language models, Agent models, and World models, for more robust and versatile reasoning capabilities. In particular, we propose that world and agent models are a better abstraction of reasoning, that introduces the crucial elements of deliberate human-like reasoning, including beliefs about the world and other agents, anticipation of consequences, goals/rewards, and strategic planning. Crucially, language models in LAW serve as a backend to implement the system or its elements and hence provide the computational power and adaptability. We review the recent studies that have made relevant progress and discuss future research directions towards operationalizing the LAW framework.
Algorithmic discrimination is a condition that arises when data-driven software unfairly treats users based on attributes like ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, or other personal characteristics. Nowadays, as machine learning gains popularity, cases of algorithmic discrimination are increasingly being reported in several contexts. This study delves into various studies published over the years reporting algorithmic discrimination. We aim to support software engineering researchers and practitioners in addressing this issue by discussing key characteristics of the problem
Code provides a general syntactic structure to build complex programs and perform precise computations when paired with a code interpreter - we hypothesize that language models (LMs) can leverage code-writing to improve Chain of Thought reasoning not only for logic and arithmetic tasks, but also for semantic ones (and in particular, those that are a mix of both). For example, consider prompting an LM to write code that counts the number of times it detects sarcasm in an essay: the LM may struggle to write an implementation for "detect_sarcasm(string)" that can be executed by the interpreter (handling the edge cases would be insurmountable). However, LMs may still produce a valid solution if they not only write code, but also selectively "emulate" the interpreter by generating the expected output of "detect_sarcasm(string)" and other lines of code that cannot be executed. In this work, we propose Chain of Code (CoC), a simple yet surprisingly effective extension that improves LM code-driven reasoning. The key idea is to encourage LMs to format semantic sub-tasks in a program as flexible pseudocode that the interpreter can explicitly catch undefined behaviors and hand off to simulate with an LM (as an "LMulator"). Experiments demonstrate that Chain of Code outperforms Chain of Thought and other baselines across a variety of benchmarks; on BIG-Bench Hard, Chain of Code achieves 84%, a gain of 12% over Chain of Thought. CoC scales well with large and small models alike, and broadens the scope of reasoning questions that LMs can correctly answer by "thinking in code". Project webpage: //chain-of-code.github.io.
For multi-transmission rate environments, access point (AP) connection methods have been proposed for maximizing system throughput, which is the throughput of an entire system, on the basis of the cooperative behavior of users. These methods derive optimal positions for the cooperative behavior of users, which means that new users move to improve the system throughput when connecting to an AP. However, the conventional method only considers the transmission rate of new users and does not consider existing users, even though it is necessary to consider the transmission rate of all users to improve system throughput. In addition, these method do not take into account the frequency of interference between users. In this paper, we propose an AP connection method which maximizes system throughput by considering the interference between users and the initial position of all users. In addition, our proposed method can improve system throughput by about 6% at most compared to conventional methods.
Graph clustering, which aims to divide the nodes in the graph into several distinct clusters, is a fundamental and challenging task. In recent years, deep graph clustering methods have been increasingly proposed and achieved promising performance. However, the corresponding survey paper is scarce and it is imminent to make a summary in this field. From this motivation, this paper makes the first comprehensive survey of deep graph clustering. Firstly, the detailed definition of deep graph clustering and the important baseline methods are introduced. Besides, the taxonomy of deep graph clustering methods is proposed based on four different criteria including graph type, network architecture, learning paradigm, and clustering method. In addition, through the careful analysis of the existing works, the challenges and opportunities from five perspectives are summarized. At last, the applications of deep graph clustering in four domains are presented. It is worth mentioning that a collection of state-of-the-art deep graph clustering methods including papers, codes, and datasets is available on GitHub. We hope this work will serve as a quick guide and help researchers to overcome challenges in this vibrant field.
Existing recommender systems extract the user preference based on learning the correlation in data, such as behavioral correlation in collaborative filtering, feature-feature, or feature-behavior correlation in click-through rate prediction. However, regretfully, the real world is driven by causality rather than correlation, and correlation does not imply causation. For example, the recommender systems can recommend a battery charger to a user after buying a phone, in which the latter can serve as the cause of the former, and such a causal relation cannot be reversed. Recently, to address it, researchers in recommender systems have begun to utilize causal inference to extract causality, enhancing the recommender system. In this survey, we comprehensively review the literature on causal inference-based recommendation. At first, we present the fundamental concepts of both recommendation and causal inference as the basis of later content. We raise the typical issues that the non-causality recommendation is faced. Afterward, we comprehensively review the existing work of causal inference-based recommendation, based on a taxonomy of what kind of problem causal inference addresses. Last, we discuss the open problems in this important research area, along with interesting future works.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Visual information extraction (VIE) has attracted considerable attention recently owing to its various advanced applications such as document understanding, automatic marking and intelligent education. Most existing works decoupled this problem into several independent sub-tasks of text spotting (text detection and recognition) and information extraction, which completely ignored the high correlation among them during optimization. In this paper, we propose a robust visual information extraction system (VIES) towards real-world scenarios, which is a unified end-to-end trainable framework for simultaneous text detection, recognition and information extraction by taking a single document image as input and outputting the structured information. Specifically, the information extraction branch collects abundant visual and semantic representations from text spotting for multimodal feature fusion and conversely, provides higher-level semantic clues to contribute to the optimization of text spotting. Moreover, regarding the shortage of public benchmarks, we construct a fully-annotated dataset called EPHOIE (//github.com/HCIILAB/EPHOIE), which is the first Chinese benchmark for both text spotting and visual information extraction. EPHOIE consists of 1,494 images of examination paper head with complex layouts and background, including a total of 15,771 Chinese handwritten or printed text instances. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our VIES shows significant superior performance on the EPHOIE dataset and achieves a 9.01% F-score gain on the widely used SROIE dataset under the end-to-end scenario.
Recommender systems exploit interaction history to estimate user preference, having been heavily used in a wide range of industry applications. However, static recommendation models are difficult to answer two important questions well due to inherent shortcomings: (a) What exactly does a user like? (b) Why does a user like an item? The shortcomings are due to the way that static models learn user preference, i.e., without explicit instructions and active feedback from users. The recent rise of conversational recommender systems (CRSs) changes this situation fundamentally. In a CRS, users and the system can dynamically communicate through natural language interactions, which provide unprecedented opportunities to explicitly obtain the exact preference of users. Considerable efforts, spread across disparate settings and applications, have been put into developing CRSs. Existing models, technologies, and evaluation methods for CRSs are far from mature. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of the techniques used in current CRSs. We summarize the key challenges of developing CRSs into five directions: (1) Question-based user preference elicitation. (2) Multi-turn conversational recommendation strategies. (3) Dialogue understanding and generation. (4) Exploitation-exploration trade-offs. (5) Evaluation and user simulation. These research directions involve multiple research fields like information retrieval (IR), natural language processing (NLP), and human-computer interaction (HCI). Based on these research directions, we discuss some future challenges and opportunities. We provide a road map for researchers from multiple communities to get started in this area. We hope this survey helps to identify and address challenges in CRSs and inspire future research.
This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.