Sequential recommendation aims to estimate how a user's interests evolve over time via uncovering valuable patterns from user behavior history. Many previous sequential models have solely relied on users' historical information to model the evolution of their interests, neglecting the crucial role that future information plays in accurately capturing these dynamics. However, effectively incorporating future information in sequential modeling is non-trivial since it is impossible to make the current-step prediction for any target user by leveraging his future data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of sequential recommendation called Look into the Future (LIFT), which builds and leverages the contexts of sequential recommendation. In LIFT, the context of a target user's interaction is represented based on i) his own past behaviors and ii) the past and future behaviors of the retrieved similar interactions from other users. As such, the learned context will be more informative and effective in predicting the target user's behaviors in sequential recommendation without temporal data leakage. Furthermore, in order to exploit the intrinsic information embedded within the context itself, we introduce an innovative pretraining methodology incorporating behavior masking. In our extensive experiments on five real-world datasets, LIFT achieves significant performance improvement on click-through rate prediction and rating prediction tasks in sequential recommendation over strong baselines, demonstrating that retrieving and leveraging relevant contexts from the global user pool greatly benefits sequential recommendation. The experiment code is provided at //anonymous.4open.science/r/LIFT-277C/Readme.md.
Many applications are leveraging large language models (LLMs) for complex tasks, and they generally demand low inference latency and high serving throughput for interactive online jobs such as chatbots. However, the tight latency requirement and high load variance of applications pose challenges to serving systems in achieving high GPU utilization. Due to the high costs of scheduling and preemption, today's systems generally use separate clusters to serve online and offline inference tasks, and dedicate GPUs for online inferences to avoid interference. This approach leads to underutilized GPUs because one must reserve enough GPU resources for the peak expected load, even if the average load is low. This paper proposes to harvest stranded GPU resources for offline LLM inference tasks such as document summarization and LLM benchmarking. Unlike online inferences, these tasks usually run in a batch-processing manner with loose latency requirements, making them a good fit for stranded resources that are only available shortly. To enable safe and efficient GPU harvesting without interfering with online tasks, we built ConServe, an LLM serving system that contains (1) an execution engine that preempts running offline tasks upon the arrival of online tasks, (2) an incremental checkpointing mechanism that minimizes the amount of recomputation required by preemptions, and (3) a scheduler that adaptively batches offline tasks for higher GPU utilization. Our evaluation demonstrates that ConServe achieves strong performance isolation when co-serving online and offline tasks but at a much higher GPU utilization. When colocating practical online and offline workloads on popular models such as Llama-2-7B, ConServe achieves 2.35$\times$ higher throughput than state-of-the-art online serving systems and reduces serving latency by 84$\times$ compared to existing co-serving systems.
Recommender systems suffer from the cold-start problem whenever a new user joins the platform or a new item is added to the catalog. To address item cold-start, we propose to replace the embedding layer in sequential recommenders with a dynamic storage that has no learnable weights and can keep an arbitrary number of representations. In this paper, we present FELRec, a large embedding network that refines the existing representations of users and items in a recursive manner, as new information becomes available. In contrast to similar approaches, our model represents new users and items without side information and time-consuming finetuning, instead it runs a single forward pass over a sequence of existing representations. During item cold-start, our method outperforms similar method by 29.50%-47.45%. Further, our proposed model generalizes well to previously unseen datasets in zero-shot settings. The source code is publicly available at //github.com/kweimann/FELRec .
Recommender systems are designed to suggest items based on user preferences, helping users navigate the vast amount of information available on the internet. Given the overwhelming content, outlier detection has emerged as a key research area in recommender systems. It involves identifying unusual or suspicious patterns in user behavior. However, existing studies in this field face several challenges, including the limited universality of algorithms, difficulties in selecting users, and a lack of optimization. In this paper, we propose an approach that addresses these challenges by employing various clustering algorithms. Specifically, we utilize a user-user matrix-based clustering technique to detect outliers. By constructing a user-user matrix, we can identify suspicious users in the system. Both local and global outliers are detected to ensure comprehensive analysis. Our experimental results demonstrate that this approach significantly improves the accuracy of outlier detection in recommender systems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.