Empathetic response generation, aiming to understand the user's situation and feelings and respond empathically, is crucial in building human-like dialogue systems. Traditional approaches typically employ maximum likelihood estimation as the optimization objective during training, yet fail to align the empathy levels between generated and target responses. To this end, we propose an empathetic response generation framework using reinforcement learning (EmpRL). The framework develops an effective empathy reward function and generates empathetic responses by maximizing the expected reward through reinforcement learning. EmpRL utilizes the pre-trained T5 model as the generator and further fine-tunes it to initialize the policy. To align the empathy levels between generated and target responses within a given context, an empathy reward function containing three empathy communication mechanisms -- emotional reaction, interpretation, and exploration -- is constructed using pre-designed and pre-trained empathy identifiers. During reinforcement learning training, the proximal policy optimization algorithm is used to fine-tune the policy, enabling the generation of empathetic responses. Both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that the proposed EmpRL framework significantly improves the quality of generated responses, enhances the similarity in empathy levels between generated and target responses, and produces empathetic responses covering both affective and cognitive aspects.
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Hyperproperties are commonly used in computer security to define information-flow policies and other requirements that reason about the relationship between multiple computations. In this paper, we study a novel class of hyperproperties where the individual computation paths are chosen by the strategic choices of a coalition of agents in a multi-agent system. We introduce HyperATL*, an extension of computation tree logic with path variables and strategy quantifiers. Our logic can express strategic hyperproperties, such as that the scheduler in a concurrent system has a strategy to avoid information leakage. HyperATL* is particularly useful to specify asynchronous hyperproperties, i.e., hyperproperties where the speed of the execution on the different computation paths depends on the choices of the scheduler. Unlike other recent logics for the specification of asynchronous hyperproperties, our logic is the first to admit decidable model checking for the full logic. We present a model checking algorithm for HyperATL* based on alternating automata, and show that our algorithm is asymptotically optimal by providing a matching lower bound. We have implemented a prototype model checker for a fragment of HyperATL*, able to check various security properties on small programs.
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.
Sequential recommendation aims to leverage users' historical behaviors to predict their next interaction. Existing works have not yet addressed two main challenges in sequential recommendation. First, user behaviors in their rich historical sequences are often implicit and noisy preference signals, they cannot sufficiently reflect users' actual preferences. In addition, users' dynamic preferences often change rapidly over time, and hence it is difficult to capture user patterns in their historical sequences. In this work, we propose a graph neural network model called SURGE (short for SeqUential Recommendation with Graph neural nEtworks) to address these two issues. Specifically, SURGE integrates different types of preferences in long-term user behaviors into clusters in the graph by re-constructing loose item sequences into tight item-item interest graphs based on metric learning. This helps explicitly distinguish users' core interests, by forming dense clusters in the interest graph. Then, we perform cluster-aware and query-aware graph convolutional propagation and graph pooling on the constructed graph. It dynamically fuses and extracts users' current activated core interests from noisy user behavior sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and proprietary industrial datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains of our proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods. Further studies on sequence length confirm that our method can model long behavioral sequences effectively and efficiently.
Music streaming services heavily rely on recommender systems to improve their users' experience, by helping them navigate through a large musical catalog and discover new songs, albums or artists. However, recommending relevant and personalized content to new users, with few to no interactions with the catalog, is challenging. This is commonly referred to as the user cold start problem. In this applied paper, we present the system recently deployed on the music streaming service Deezer to address this problem. The solution leverages a semi-personalized recommendation strategy, based on a deep neural network architecture and on a clustering of users from heterogeneous sources of information. We extensively show the practical impact of this system and its effectiveness at predicting the future musical preferences of cold start users on Deezer, through both offline and online large-scale experiments. Besides, we publicly release our code as well as anonymized usage data from our experiments. We hope that this release of industrial resources will benefit future research on user cold start recommendation.
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.
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.
Providing model-generated explanations in recommender systems is important to user experience. State-of-the-art recommendation algorithms -- especially the collaborative filtering (CF) based approaches with shallow or deep models -- usually work with various unstructured information sources for recommendation, such as textual reviews, visual images, and various implicit or explicit feedbacks. Though structured knowledge bases were considered in content-based approaches, they have been largely ignored recently due to the availability of vast amount of data and the learning power of many complex models. However, structured knowledge bases exhibit unique advantages in personalized recommendation systems. When the explicit knowledge about users and items is considered for recommendation, the system could provide highly customized recommendations based on users' historical behaviors and the knowledge is helpful for providing informed explanations regarding the recommended items. In this work, we propose to reason over knowledge base embeddings for explainable recommendation. Specifically, we propose a knowledge base representation learning framework to embed heterogeneous entities for recommendation, and based on the embedded knowledge base, a soft matching algorithm is proposed to generate personalized explanations for the recommended items. Experimental results on real-world e-commerce datasets verified the superior recommendation performance and the explainability power of our approach compared with state-of-the-art baselines.
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.
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