Multimodal recommendation exploits the rich multimodal information associated with users or items to enhance the representation learning for better performance. In these methods, end-to-end feature extractors (e.g., shallow/deep neural networks) are often adopted to tailor the generic multimodal features that are extracted from raw data by pre-trained models for recommendation. However, compact extractors, such as shallow neural networks, may find it challenging to extract effective information from complex and high-dimensional generic modality features. Conversely, DNN-based extractors may encounter the data sparsity problem in recommendation. To address this problem, we propose a novel model-agnostic approach called Semantic-guided Feature Distillation (SGFD), which employs a teacher-student framework to extract feature for multimodal recommendation. The teacher model first extracts rich modality features from the generic modality feature by considering both the semantic information of items and the complementary information of multiple modalities. SGFD then utilizes response-based and feature-based distillation loss to effectively transfer the knowledge encoded in the teacher model to the student model. To evaluate the effectiveness of our SGFD, we integrate SGFD into three backbone multimodal recommendation models. Extensive experiments on three public real-world datasets demonstrate that SGFD-enhanced models can achieve substantial improvement over their counterparts.
Passwords remain the most widely used form of user authentication, despite advancements in other methods. However, their limitations, such as susceptibility to attacks, especially weak passwords defined by human users, are well-documented. The existence of weak human-defined passwords has led to repeated password leaks from websites, many of which are of large scale. While such password leaks are unfortunate security incidents, they provide security researchers and practitioners with good opportunities to learn valuable insights from such leaked passwords, in order to identify ways to improve password policies and other security controls on passwords. Researchers have proposed different data visualisation techniques to help analyse leaked passwords. However, many approaches rely solely on frequency analysis, with limited exploration of distance-based graphs. This paper reports PassViz, a novel method that combines the edit distance with the t-SNE (t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding) dimensionality reduction algorithm for visualising and analysing leaked passwords in a 2-D space. We implemented PassViz as an easy-to-use command-line tool for visualising large-scale password databases, and also as a graphical user interface (GUI) to support interactive visual analytics of small password databases. Using the "000webhost" leaked database as an example, we show how PassViz can be used to visually analyse different aspects of leaked passwords and to facilitate the discovery of previously unknown password patterns. Overall, our approach empowers researchers and practitioners to gain valuable insights and improve password security through effective data visualisation and analysis.
The performance of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo crucially depends on its parameters, in particular the integration timestep and the number of integration steps. We present an adaptive general-purpose framework to automatically tune these parameters based on a loss function which promotes the fast exploration of phase-space. For this, we make use of a fully-differentiable set-up and use backpropagation for optimization. An attention-like loss is defined which allows for the gradient driven learning of the distribution of integration steps. We also highlight the importance of jittering for a smooth loss-surface. Our approach is demonstrated for the one-dimensional harmonic oscillator and alanine dipeptide, a small protein common as a test-case for simulation methods. We find a good correspondence between our loss and the autocorrelation times, resulting in well-tuned parameters for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo.
We consider the problem of distilling efficient network topologies for collective communications. We provide an algorithmic framework for constructing direct-connect topologies optimized for the latency vs. bandwidth trade-off associated with the workload. Our approach synthesizes many different topologies and schedules for a given cluster size and degree and then identifies the appropriate topology and schedule for a given workload. Our algorithms start from small, optimal base topologies and associated communication schedules and use a set of techniques that can be iteratively applied to derive much larger topologies and schedules. Additionally, we incorporate well-studied large-scale graph topologies into our algorithmic framework by producing efficient collective schedules for them using a novel polynomial-time algorithm. Our evaluation uses multiple testbeds and large-scale simulations to demonstrate significant performance benefits from our derived topologies and schedules.
Personalized recommender systems play a crucial role in capturing users' evolving preferences over time to provide accurate and effective recommendations on various online platforms. However, many recommendation models rely on a single type of behavior learning, which limits their ability to represent the complex relationships between users and items in real-life scenarios. In such situations, users interact with items in multiple ways, including clicking, tagging as favorite, reviewing, and purchasing. To address this issue, we propose the Relation-aware Contrastive Learning (RCL) framework, which effectively models dynamic interaction heterogeneity. The RCL model incorporates a multi-relational graph encoder that captures short-term preference heterogeneity while preserving the dedicated relation semantics for different types of user-item interactions. Moreover, we design a dynamic cross-relational memory network that enables the RCL model to capture users' long-term multi-behavior preferences and the underlying evolving cross-type behavior dependencies over time. To obtain robust and informative user representations with both commonality and diversity across multi-behavior interactions, we introduce a multi-relational contrastive learning paradigm with heterogeneous short- and long-term interest modeling. Our extensive experimental studies on several real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the RCL recommender system over various state-of-the-art baselines in terms of recommendation accuracy and effectiveness.
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group develops novel machine learning algorithms for autonomous systems control, with a specific focus on deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Research problems include scalable learning of coordinated agent policies and inter-agent communication; reasoning about the behaviours, goals, and composition of other agents from limited observations; and sample-efficient learning based on intrinsic motivation, curriculum learning, causal inference, and representation learning. This article provides a broad overview of the ongoing research portfolio of the group and discusses open problems for future directions.
Social relations are often used to improve recommendation quality when user-item interaction data is sparse in recommender systems. Most existing social recommendation models exploit pairwise relations to mine potential user preferences. However, real-life interactions among users are very complicated and user relations can be high-order. Hypergraph provides a natural way to model complex high-order relations, while its potentials for improving social recommendation are under-explored. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose a multi-channel hypergraph convolutional network to enhance social recommendation by leveraging high-order user relations. Technically, each channel in the network encodes a hypergraph that depicts a common high-order user relation pattern via hypergraph convolution. By aggregating the embeddings learned through multiple channels, we obtain comprehensive user representations to generate recommendation results. However, the aggregation operation might also obscure the inherent characteristics of different types of high-order connectivity information. To compensate for the aggregating loss, we innovatively integrate self-supervised learning into the training of the hypergraph convolutional network to regain the connectivity information with hierarchical mutual information maximization. The experimental results on multiple real-world datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the SOTA methods, and the ablation study verifies the effectiveness of the multi-channel setting and the self-supervised task. The implementation of our model is available via //github.com/Coder-Yu/RecQ.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
The chronological order of user-item interactions can reveal time-evolving and sequential user behaviors in many recommender systems. The items that users will interact with may depend on the items accessed in the past. However, the substantial increase of users and items makes sequential recommender systems still face non-trivial challenges: (1) the hardness of modeling the short-term user interests; (2) the difficulty of capturing the long-term user interests; (3) the effective modeling of item co-occurrence patterns. To tackle these challenges, we propose a memory augmented graph neural network (MA-GNN) to capture both the long- and short-term user interests. Specifically, we apply a graph neural network to model the item contextual information within a short-term period and utilize a shared memory network to capture the long-range dependencies between items. In addition to the modeling of user interests, we employ a bilinear function to capture the co-occurrence patterns of related items. We extensively evaluate our model on five real-world datasets, comparing with several state-of-the-art methods and using a variety of performance metrics. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for the task of Top-K sequential recommendation.
To provide more accurate, diverse, and explainable recommendation, it is compulsory to go beyond modeling user-item interactions and take side information into account. Traditional methods like factorization machine (FM) cast it as a supervised learning problem, which assumes each interaction as an independent instance with side information encoded. Due to the overlook of the relations among instances or items (e.g., the director of a movie is also an actor of another movie), these methods are insufficient to distill the collaborative signal from the collective behaviors of users. In this work, we investigate the utility of knowledge graph (KG), which breaks down the independent interaction assumption by linking items with their attributes. We argue that in such a hybrid structure of KG and user-item graph, high-order relations --- which connect two items with one or multiple linked attributes --- are an essential factor for successful recommendation. We propose a new method named Knowledge Graph Attention Network (KGAT) which explicitly models the high-order connectivities in KG in an end-to-end fashion. It recursively propagates the embeddings from a node's neighbors (which can be users, items, or attributes) to refine the node's embedding, and employs an attention mechanism to discriminate the importance of the neighbors. Our KGAT is conceptually advantageous to existing KG-based recommendation methods, which either exploit high-order relations by extracting paths or implicitly modeling them with regularization. Empirical results on three public benchmarks show that KGAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods like Neural FM and RippleNet. Further studies verify the efficacy of embedding propagation for high-order relation modeling and the interpretability benefits brought by the attention mechanism.
Many current applications use recommendations in order to modify the natural user behavior, such as to increase the number of sales or the time spent on a website. This results in a gap between the final recommendation objective and the classical setup where recommendation candidates are evaluated by their coherence with past user behavior, by predicting either the missing entries in the user-item matrix, or the most likely next event. To bridge this gap, we optimize a recommendation policy for the task of increasing the desired outcome versus the organic user behavior. We show this is equivalent to learning to predict recommendation outcomes under a fully random recommendation policy. To this end, we propose a new domain adaptation algorithm that learns from logged data containing outcomes from a biased recommendation policy and predicts recommendation outcomes according to random exposure. We compare our method against state-of-the-art factorization methods, in addition to new approaches of causal recommendation and show significant improvements.