Recommender systems are important for providing personalized services to users, but the vast amount of collected user data has raised concerns about privacy (e.g., sensitive data), security (e.g., malicious data) and utility (e.g., toxic data). To address these challenges, recommendation unlearning has emerged as a promising approach, which allows specific data and models to be forgotten, mitigating the risks of sensitive/malicious/toxic user data. However, existing methods often struggle to balance completeness, utility, and efficiency, i.e., compromising one for the other, leading to suboptimal recommendation unlearning. In this paper, we propose an Interaction and Mapping Matrices Correction (IMCorrect) method for recommendation unlearning. Firstly, we reveal that many collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms can be formulated as mapping-based approach, in which the recommendation results can be obtained by multiplying the user-item interaction matrix with a mapping matrix. Then, IMCorrect can achieve efficient recommendation unlearning by correcting the interaction matrix and enhance the completeness and utility by correcting the mapping matrix, all without costly model retraining. Unlike existing methods, IMCorrect is a whitebox model that offers greater flexibility in handling various recommendation unlearning scenarios. Additionally, it has the unique capability of incrementally learning from new data, which further enhances its practicality. We conducted comprehensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of IMCorrect and the results demonstrate that IMCorrect is superior in completeness, utility, and efficiency, and is applicable in many recommendation unlearning scenarios.
It is often useful to perform integration over learned functions represented by neural networks. However, this integration is usually performed numerically, as analytical integration over learned functions (especially neural networks) is generally viewed as intractable. In this work, we present a method for representing the analytical integral of a learned function $f$. This allows the exact integral of a neural network to be computed, and enables constrained neural networks to be parametrised by applying constraints directly to the integral. Crucially, we also introduce a method to constrain $f$ to be positive, a necessary condition for many applications (e.g. probability distributions, distance metrics, etc). Finally, we introduce several applications where our fixed-integral neural network (FINN) can be utilised.
Composed image retrieval is a type of image retrieval task where the user provides a reference image as a starting point and specifies a text on how to shift from the starting point to the desired target image. However, most existing methods focus on the composition learning of text and reference images and oversimplify the text as a description, neglecting the inherent structure and the user's shifting intention of the texts. As a result, these methods typically take shortcuts that disregard the visual cue of the reference images. To address this issue, we reconsider the text as instructions and propose a Semantic Shift network (SSN) that explicitly decomposes the semantic shifts into two steps: from the reference image to the visual prototype and from the visual prototype to the target image. Specifically, SSN explicitly decomposes the instructions into two components: degradation and upgradation, where the degradation is used to picture the visual prototype from the reference image, while the upgradation is used to enrich the visual prototype into the final representations to retrieve the desired target image. The experimental results show that the proposed SSN demonstrates a significant improvement of 5.42% and 1.37% on the CIRR and FashionIQ datasets, respectively, and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance. Codes will be publicly available.
Invariant approaches have been remarkably successful in tackling the problem of domain generalization, where the objective is to perform inference on data distributions different from those used in training. In our work, we investigate whether it is possible to leverage domain information from the unseen test samples themselves. We propose a domain-adaptive approach consisting of two steps: a) we first learn a discriminative domain embedding from unsupervised training examples, and b) use this domain embedding as supplementary information to build a domain-adaptive model, that takes both the input as well as its domain into account while making predictions. For unseen domains, our method simply uses few unlabelled test examples to construct the domain embedding. This enables adaptive classification on any unseen domain. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on various domain generalization benchmarks. In addition, we introduce the first real-world, large-scale domain generalization benchmark, Geo-YFCC, containing 1.1M samples over 40 training, 7 validation, and 15 test domains, orders of magnitude larger than prior work. We show that the existing approaches either do not scale to this dataset or underperform compared to the simple baseline of training a model on the union of data from all training domains. In contrast, our approach achieves a significant improvement.
Recommender systems play a fundamental role in web applications in filtering massive information and matching user interests. While many efforts have been devoted to developing more effective models in various scenarios, the exploration on the explainability of recommender systems is running behind. Explanations could help improve user experience and discover system defects. In this paper, after formally introducing the elements that are related to model explainability, we propose a novel explainable recommendation model through improving the transparency of the representation learning process. Specifically, to overcome the representation entangling problem in traditional models, we revise traditional graph convolution to discriminate information from different layers. Also, each representation vector is factorized into several segments, where each segment relates to one semantic aspect in data. Different from previous work, in our model, factor discovery and representation learning are simultaneously conducted, and we are able to handle extra attribute information and knowledge. In this way, the proposed model can learn interpretable and meaningful representations for users and items. Unlike traditional methods that need to make a trade-off between explainability and effectiveness, the performance of our proposed explainable model is not negatively affected after considering explainability. Finally, comprehensive experiments are conducted to validate the performance of our model as well as explanation faithfulness.
Edge intelligence refers to a set of connected systems and devices for data collection, caching, processing, and analysis in locations close to where data is captured based on artificial intelligence. The aim of edge intelligence is to enhance the quality and speed of data processing and protect the privacy and security of the data. Although recently emerged, spanning the period from 2011 to now, this field of research has shown explosive growth over the past five years. In this paper, we present a thorough and comprehensive survey on the literature surrounding edge intelligence. We first identify four fundamental components of edge intelligence, namely edge caching, edge training, edge inference, and edge offloading, based on theoretical and practical results pertaining to proposed and deployed systems. We then aim for a systematic classification of the state of the solutions by examining research results and observations for each of the four components and present a taxonomy that includes practical problems, adopted techniques, and application goals. For each category, we elaborate, compare and analyse the literature from the perspectives of adopted techniques, objectives, performance, advantages and drawbacks, etc. This survey article provides a comprehensive introduction to edge intelligence and its application areas. In addition, we summarise the development of the emerging research field and the current state-of-the-art and discuss the important open issues and possible theoretical and technical solutions.
For better user experience and business effectiveness, Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction has been one of the most important tasks in E-commerce. Although extensive CTR prediction models have been proposed, learning good representation of items from multimodal features is still less investigated, considering an item in E-commerce usually contains multiple heterogeneous modalities. Previous works either concatenate the multiple modality features, that is equivalent to giving a fixed importance weight to each modality; or learn dynamic weights of different modalities for different items through technique like attention mechanism. However, a problem is that there usually exists common redundant information across multiple modalities. The dynamic weights of different modalities computed by using the redundant information may not correctly reflect the different importance of each modality. To address this, we explore the complementarity and redundancy of modalities by considering modality-specific and modality-invariant features differently. We propose a novel Multimodal Adversarial Representation Network (MARN) for the CTR prediction task. A multimodal attention network first calculates the weights of multiple modalities for each item according to its modality-specific features. Then a multimodal adversarial network learns modality-invariant representations where a double-discriminators strategy is introduced. Finally, we achieve the multimodal item representations by combining both modality-specific and modality-invariant representations. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets, and the proposed method consistently achieves remarkable improvements to the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the approach has been deployed in an operational E-commerce system and online A/B testing further demonstrates the effectiveness.
To solve the information explosion problem and enhance user experience in various online applications, recommender systems have been developed to model users preferences. Although numerous efforts have been made toward more personalized recommendations, recommender systems still suffer from several challenges, such as data sparsity and cold start. In recent years, generating recommendations with the knowledge graph as side information has attracted considerable interest. Such an approach can not only alleviate the abovementioned issues for a more accurate recommendation, but also provide explanations for recommended items. In this paper, we conduct a systematical survey of knowledge graph-based recommender systems. We collect recently published papers in this field and summarize them from two perspectives. On the one hand, we investigate the proposed algorithms by focusing on how the papers utilize the knowledge graph for accurate and explainable recommendation. On the other hand, we introduce datasets used in these works. Finally, we propose several potential research directions in this field.
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.
Graphs, which describe pairwise relations between objects, are essential representations of many real-world data such as social networks. In recent years, graph neural networks, which extend the neural network models to graph data, have attracted increasing attention. Graph neural networks have been applied to advance many different graph related tasks such as reasoning dynamics of the physical system, graph classification, and node classification. Most of the existing graph neural network models have been designed for static graphs, while many real-world graphs are inherently dynamic. For example, social networks are naturally evolving as new users joining and new relations being created. Current graph neural network models cannot utilize the dynamic information in dynamic graphs. However, the dynamic information has been proven to enhance the performance of many graph analytical tasks such as community detection and link prediction. Hence, it is necessary to design dedicated graph neural networks for dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose DGNN, a new {\bf D}ynamic {\bf G}raph {\bf N}eural {\bf N}etwork model, which can model the dynamic information as the graph evolving. In particular, the proposed framework can keep updating node information by capturing the sequential information of edges, the time intervals between edges and information propagation coherently. Experimental results on various dynamic graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
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.