To drive purchase in online advertising, it is of the advertiser's great interest to optimize the sequential advertising strategy whose performance and interpretability are both important. The lack of interpretability in existing deep reinforcement learning methods makes it not easy to understand, diagnose and further optimize the strategy. In this paper, we propose our Deep Intents Sequential Advertising (DISA) method to address these issues. The key part of interpretability is to understand a consumer's purchase intent which is, however, unobservable (called hidden states). In this paper, we model this intention as a latent variable and formulate the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) where the underlying intents are inferred based on the observable behaviors. Large-scale industrial offline and online experiments demonstrate our method's superior performance over several baselines. The inferred hidden states are analyzed, and the results prove the rationality of our inference.
Model-based methods for recommender systems have been studied extensively in recent years. In systems with large corpus, however, the calculation cost for the learnt model to predict all user-item preferences is tremendous, which makes full corpus retrieval extremely difficult. To overcome the calculation barriers, models such as matrix factorization resort to inner product form (i.e., model user-item preference as the inner product of user, item latent factors) and indexes to facilitate efficient approximate k-nearest neighbor searches. However, it still remains challenging to incorporate more expressive interaction forms between user and item features, e.g., interactions through deep neural networks, because of the calculation cost. In this paper, we focus on the problem of introducing arbitrary advanced models to recommender systems with large corpus. We propose a novel tree-based method which can provide logarithmic complexity w.r.t. corpus size even with more expressive models such as deep neural networks. Our main idea is to predict user interests from coarse to fine by traversing tree nodes in a top-down fashion and making decisions for each user-node pair. We also show that the tree structure can be jointly learnt towards better compatibility with users' interest distribution and hence facilitate both training and prediction. Experimental evaluations with two large-scale real-world datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms traditional methods. Online A/B test results in Taobao display advertising platform also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in production environments.
Most existing works on dialog systems only consider conversation content while neglecting the personality of the user the bot is interacting with, which begets several unsolved issues. In this paper, we present a personalized end-to-end model in an attempt to leverage personalization in goal-oriented dialogs. We first introduce a Profile Model which encodes user profiles into distributed embeddings and refers to conversation history from other similar users. Then a Preference Model captures user preferences over knowledge base entities to handle the ambiguity in user requests. The two models are combined into the Personalized MemN2N. Experiments show that the proposed model achieves qualitative performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods. As for human evaluation, it also outperforms other approaches in terms of task completion rate and user satisfaction.
Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods are limited typically to a small number of agents. When the agent number increases largely, the learning becomes intractable due to the curse of the dimensionality and the exponential growth of agent interactions. In this paper, we present Mean Field Reinforcement Learning where the interactions within the population of agents are approximated by those between a single agent and the average effect from the overall population or neighboring agents; the interplay between the two entities is mutually reinforced: the learning of the individual agent's optimal policy depends on the dynamics of the population, while the dynamics of the population change according to the collective patterns of the individual policies. We develop practical mean field Q-learning and mean field Actor-Critic algorithms and analyze the convergence of the solution to Nash equilibrium. Experiments on Gaussian squeeze, Ising model, and battle games justify the learning effectiveness of our mean field approaches. In addition, we report the first result to solve the Ising model via model-free reinforcement learning methods.
We introduce an approach for deep reinforcement learning (RL) that improves upon the efficiency, generalization capacity, and interpretability of conventional approaches through structured perception and relational reasoning. It uses self-attention to iteratively reason about the relations between entities in a scene and to guide a model-free policy. Our results show that in a novel navigation and planning task called Box-World, our agent finds interpretable solutions that improve upon baselines in terms of sample complexity, ability to generalize to more complex scenes than experienced during training, and overall performance. In the StarCraft II Learning Environment, our agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on six mini-games -- surpassing human grandmaster performance on four. By considering architectural inductive biases, our work opens new directions for overcoming important, but stubborn, challenges in deep RL.
In this paper, we study the problem of modeling users' diverse interests. Previous methods usually learn a fixed user representation, which has a limited ability to represent distinct interests of a user. In order to model users' various interests, we propose a Memory Attention-aware Recommender System (MARS). MARS utilizes a memory component and a novel attentional mechanism to learn deep \textit{adaptive user representations}. Trained in an end-to-end fashion, MARS adaptively summarizes users' interests. In the experiments, MARS outperforms seven state-of-the-art methods on three real-world datasets in terms of recall and mean average precision. We also demonstrate that MARS has a great interpretability to explain its recommendation results, which is important in many recommendation scenarios.
Generative models (GMs) such as Generative Adversary Network (GAN) and Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) have thrived these years and achieved high quality results in generating new samples. Especially in Computer Vision, GMs have been used in image inpainting, denoising and completion, which can be treated as the inference from observed pixels to corrupted pixels. However, images are hierarchically structured which are quite different from many real-world inference scenarios with non-hierarchical features. These inference scenarios contain heterogeneous stochastic variables and irregular mutual dependences. Traditionally they are modeled by Bayesian Network (BN). However, the learning and inference of BN model are NP-hard thus the number of stochastic variables in BN is highly constrained. In this paper, we adapt typical GMs to enable heterogeneous learning and inference in polynomial time.We also propose an extended autoregressive (EAR) model and an EAR with adversary loss (EARA) model and give theoretical results on their effectiveness. Experiments on several BN datasets show that our proposed EAR model achieves the best performance in most cases compared to other GMs. Except for black box analysis, we've also done a serial of experiments on Markov border inference of GMs for white box analysis and give theoretical results.
We introduce an effective model to overcome the problem of mode collapse when training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Firstly, we propose a new generator objective that finds it better to tackle mode collapse. And, we apply an independent Autoencoders (AE) to constrain the generator and consider its reconstructed samples as "real" samples to slow down the convergence of discriminator that enables to reduce the gradient vanishing problem and stabilize the model. Secondly, from mappings between latent and data spaces provided by AE, we further regularize AE by the relative distance between the latent and data samples to explicitly prevent the generator falling into mode collapse setting. This idea comes when we find a new way to visualize the mode collapse on MNIST dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose and apply successfully the relative distance of latent and data samples for stabilizing GAN. Thirdly, our proposed model, namely Generative Adversarial Autoencoder Networks (GAAN), is stable and has suffered from neither gradient vanishing nor mode collapse issues, as empirically demonstrated on synthetic, MNIST, MNIST-1K, CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets. Experimental results show that our method can approximate well multi-modal distribution and achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on these benchmark datasets. Our model implementation is published here: //github.com/tntrung/gaan
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.
Unsupervised learning is of growing interest because it unlocks the potential held in vast amounts of unlabelled data to learn useful representations for inference. Autoencoders, a form of generative model, may be trained by learning to reconstruct unlabelled input data from a latent representation space. More robust representations may be produced by an autoencoder if it learns to recover clean input samples from corrupted ones. Representations may be further improved by introducing regularisation during training to shape the distribution of the encoded data in latent space. We suggest denoising adversarial autoencoders, which combine denoising and regularisation, shaping the distribution of latent space using adversarial training. We introduce a novel analysis that shows how denoising may be incorporated into the training and sampling of adversarial autoencoders. Experiments are performed to assess the contributions that denoising makes to the learning of representations for classification and sample synthesis. Our results suggest that autoencoders trained using a denoising criterion achieve higher classification performance, and can synthesise samples that are more consistent with the input data than those trained without a corruption process.
Click through rate (CTR) prediction of image ads is the core task of online display advertising systems, and logistic regression (LR) has been frequently applied as the prediction model. However, LR model lacks the ability of extracting complex and intrinsic nonlinear features from handcrafted high-dimensional image features, which limits its effectiveness. To solve this issue, in this paper, we introduce a novel deep neural network (DNN) based model that directly predicts the CTR of an image ad based on raw image pixels and other basic features in one step. The DNN model employs convolution layers to automatically extract representative visual features from images, and nonlinear CTR features are then learned from visual features and other contextual features by using fully-connected layers. Empirical evaluations on a real world dataset with over 50 million records demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of this method.