Textual personality detection aims to identify personality characteristics by analyzing user-generated content toward social media platforms. Numerous psychological literature highlighted that personality encompasses both long-term stable traits and short-term dynamic states. However, existing studies often concentrate only on either long-term or short-term personality representations, without effectively combining both aspects. This limitation hinders a comprehensive understanding of individuals' personalities, as both stable traits and dynamic states are vital. To bridge this gap, we propose a Dual Enhanced Network(DEN) to jointly model users' long-term and short-term personality for textual personality detection. In DEN, a Long-term Personality Encoding is devised to effectively model long-term stable personality traits. Short-term Personality Encoding is presented to capture short-term dynamic personality states. The Bi-directional Interaction component facilitates the integration of both personality aspects, allowing for a comprehensive representation of the user's personality. Experimental results on two personality detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the DEN model and the benefits of considering both the dynamic and stable nature of personality characteristics for textual personality detection.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable potential as human-like autonomous language agents to interact with real-world environments, especially for graphical user interface (GUI) automation. However, those GUI agents require comprehensive cognition ability including exhaustive perception and reliable action response. We propose a Comprehensive Cognitive LLM Agent, CoCo-Agent, with two novel approaches, comprehensive environment perception (CEP) and conditional action prediction (CAP), to systematically improve the GUI automation performance. First, CEP facilitates the GUI perception through different aspects and granularity, including screenshots and complementary detailed layouts for the visual channel and historical actions for the textual channel. Second, CAP decomposes the action prediction into sub-problems: action type prediction and action target conditioned on the action type. With our technical design, our agent achieves new state-of-the-art performance on AITW and META-GUI benchmarks, showing promising abilities in realistic scenarios. Code is available at //github.com/xbmxb/CoCo-Agent.
Linear attention mechanisms have gained prominence in causal language models due to their linear computational complexity and enhanced speed. However, the inherent decay mechanism in linear attention presents challenges when applied to multi-dimensional sequence modeling tasks, such as image processing and multi-modal learning. In these scenarios, the utilization of sequential scanning to establish a global receptive field necessitates multiple scans for multi-dimensional data, thereby leading to inefficiencies. This paper identifies the inefficiency caused by a multiplicative linear recurrence and proposes an efficient alternative additive linear recurrence to avoid the issue, as it can handle multi-dimensional data within a single scan. We further develop an efficient multi-dimensional sequential modeling framework called LightNet based on the new recurrence. Moreover, we present two new multi-dimensional linear relative positional encoding methods, MD-TPE and MD-LRPE to enhance the model's ability to discern positional information in multi-dimensional scenarios. Our empirical evaluations across various tasks, including image classification, image generation, bidirectional language modeling, and autoregressive language modeling, demonstrate the efficacy of LightNet, showcasing its potential as a versatile and efficient solution for multi-dimensional sequential modeling.
Sequential recommendation systems (SRS) serve the purpose of predicting users' subsequent preferences based on their past interactions and have been applied across various domains such as e-commerce and social networking platforms. However, practical SRS encounters challenges due to the fact that most users engage with only a limited number of items, while the majority of items are seldom consumed. These challenges, termed as the long-tail user and long-tail item dilemmas, often create obstacles for traditional SRS methods. Mitigating these challenges is crucial as they can significantly impact user satisfaction and business profitability. While some research endeavors have alleviated these issues, they still grapple with issues such as seesaw or noise stemming from the scarcity of interactions. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) presents a promising avenue to address these challenges from a semantic standpoint. In this study, we introduce the Large Language Models Enhancement framework for Sequential Recommendation (LLM-ESR), which leverages semantic embeddings from LLMs to enhance SRS performance without increasing computational overhead. To combat the long-tail item challenge, we propose a dual-view modeling approach that fuses semantic information from LLMs with collaborative signals from traditional SRS. To address the long-tail user challenge, we introduce a retrieval augmented self-distillation technique to refine user preference representations by incorporating richer interaction data from similar users. Through comprehensive experiments conducted on three authentic datasets using three widely used SRS models, our proposed enhancement framework demonstrates superior performance compared to existing methodologies.
Robots today can exploit the rich world knowledge of large language models to chain simple behavioral skills into long-horizon tasks. However, robots often get interrupted during long-horizon tasks due to primitive skill failures and dynamic environments. We propose VADER, a plan, execute, detect framework with seeking help as a new skill that enables robots to recover and complete long-horizon tasks with the help of humans or other robots. VADER leverages visual question answering (VQA) modules to detect visual affordances and recognize execution errors. It then generates prompts for a language model planner (LMP) which decides when to seek help from another robot or human to recover from errors in long-horizon task execution. We show the effectiveness of VADER with two long-horizon robotic tasks. Our pilot study showed that VADER is capable of performing complex long-horizon tasks by asking for help from another robot to clear a table. Our user study showed that VADER is capable of performing complex long-horizon tasks by asking for help from a human to clear a path. We gathered feedback from people (N=19) about the performance of the VADER performance vs. a robot that did not ask for help. //google-vader.github.io/
With the emergence of privacy leaks in federated learning, secure aggregation protocols that mainly adopt either homomorphic encryption or threshold secret sharing have been widely developed for federated learning to protect the privacy of the local training data of each client. However, these existing protocols suffer from many shortcomings, such as the dependence on a trusted third party, the vulnerability to clients being corrupted, low efficiency, the trade-off between security and fault tolerance, etc. To solve these disadvantages, we propose an efficient and multi-private key secure aggregation scheme for federated learning. Specifically, we skillfully modify the variant ElGamal encryption technique to achieve homomorphic addition operation, which has two important advantages: 1) The server and each client can freely select public and private keys without introducing a trust third party and 2) Compared to the variant ElGamal encryption, the plaintext space is relatively large, which is more suitable for the deep model. Besides, for the high dimensional deep model parameter, we introduce a super-increasing sequence to compress multi-dimensional data into 1-D, which can greatly reduce encryption and decryption times as well as communication for ciphertext transmission. Detailed security analyses show that our proposed scheme achieves the semantic security of both individual local gradients and the aggregated result while achieving optimal robustness in tolerating both client collusion and dropped clients. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the accuracy of our scheme is almost the same as the non-private approach, while the efficiency of our scheme is much better than the state-of-the-art homomorphic encryption-based secure aggregation schemes. More importantly, the efficiency advantages of our scheme will become increasingly prominent as the number of model parameters increases.
Autonomous agents that accomplish complex computer tasks with minimal human interventions have the potential to transform human-computer interaction, significantly enhancing accessibility and productivity. However, existing benchmarks either lack an interactive environment or are limited to environments specific to certain applications or domains, failing to reflect the diverse and complex nature of real-world computer use, thereby limiting the scope of tasks and agent scalability. To address this issue, we introduce OSWorld, the first-of-its-kind scalable, real computer environment for multimodal agents, supporting task setup, execution-based evaluation, and interactive learning across various operating systems such as Ubuntu, Windows, and macOS. OSWorld can serve as a unified, integrated computer environment for assessing open-ended computer tasks that involve arbitrary applications. Building upon OSWorld, we create a benchmark of 369 computer tasks involving real web and desktop apps in open domains, OS file I/O, and workflows spanning multiple applications. Each task example is derived from real-world computer use cases and includes a detailed initial state setup configuration and a custom execution-based evaluation script for reliable, reproducible evaluation. Extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents on OSWorld reveals significant deficiencies in their ability to serve as computer assistants. While humans can accomplish over 72.36% of the tasks, the best model achieves only 12.24% success, primarily struggling with GUI grounding and operational knowledge. Comprehensive analysis using OSWorld provides valuable insights for developing multimodal generalist agents that were not possible with previous benchmarks. Our code, environment, baseline models, and data are publicly available at //os-world.github.io.
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.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
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.
Sentiment analysis is a widely studied NLP task where the goal is to determine opinions, emotions, and evaluations of users towards a product, an entity or a service that they are reviewing. One of the biggest challenges for sentiment analysis is that it is highly language dependent. Word embeddings, sentiment lexicons, and even annotated data are language specific. Further, optimizing models for each language is very time consuming and labor intensive especially for recurrent neural network models. From a resource perspective, it is very challenging to collect data for different languages. In this paper, we look for an answer to the following research question: can a sentiment analysis model trained on a language be reused for sentiment analysis in other languages, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Dutch, where the data is more limited? Our goal is to build a single model in the language with the largest dataset available for the task, and reuse it for languages that have limited resources. For this purpose, we train a sentiment analysis model using recurrent neural networks with reviews in English. We then translate reviews in other languages and reuse this model to evaluate the sentiments. Experimental results show that our robust approach of single model trained on English reviews statistically significantly outperforms the baselines in several different languages.