Recommendation problems with large numbers of discrete items, such as products, webpages, or videos, are ubiquitous in the technology industry. Deep neural networks are being increasingly used for these recommendation problems. These models use embeddings to represent discrete items as continuous vectors, and the vocabulary sizes and embedding dimensions, although heavily influence the model's accuracy, are often manually selected in a heuristical manner. We present Neural Input Search (NIS), a technique for learning the optimal vocabulary sizes and embedding dimensions for categorical features. The goal is to maximize prediction accuracy subject to a constraint on the total memory used by all embeddings. Moreover, we argue that the traditional Single-size Embedding (SE), which uses the same embedding dimension for all values of a feature, suffers from inefficient usage of model capacity and training data. We propose a novel type of embedding, namely Multi-size Embedding (ME), which allows the embedding dimension to vary for different values of the feature. During training we use reinforcement learning to find the optimal vocabulary size for each feature and embedding dimension for each value of the feature. In experiments on two common types of large scale recommendation problems, i.e. retrieval and ranking problems, NIS automatically found better vocabulary and embedding sizes that result in $6.8\%$ and $1.8\%$ relative improvements on Recall@1 and ROC-AUC over manually optimized ones.
Penn State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学）；Facebook（脸书）
In recent years, \emph{search story}, a combined display with other organic channels, has become a major source of user traffic on platforms such as e-commerce search platforms, news feed platforms and web and image search platforms. The recommended search story guides a user to identify her own preference and personal intent, which subsequently influences the user's real-time and long-term search behavior. %With such an increased importance of search stories, As search stories become increasingly important, in this work, we study the problem of personalized search story recommendation within …
In sponsored search, keyword recommendations help advertisers to achieve much better performance within limited budget. Many works have been done to mine numerous candidate keywords from search logs or landing pages. However, the strategy to select from given candidates remains to be improved. The existing relevance-based, popularity-based and regular combinatorial strategies fail to take the internal or external competitions among keywords into consideration. In this paper, we regard keyword recommendations as a combinatorial optimization problem and solve it with a modified pointer network s…
Search, recommendation, and online advertising are the three most important information-providing mechanisms on the web. These information seeking techniques, satisfying users' information needs by suggesting users personalized objects (information or services) at the appropriate time and place, play a crucial role in mitigating the information overload problem. With recent great advances in deep reinforcement learning (DRL), there have been increasing interests in developing DRL based information seeking techniques. These DRL based techniques have two key advantages -- (1) they are able to co…
With the continuous development of machine learning technology, major e-commerce platforms have launched recommendation systems based on it to serve a large number of customers with different needs more efficiently. Compared with traditional supervised learning, reinforcement learning can better capture the user's state transition in the decision-making process, and consider a series of user actions, not just the static characteristics of the user at a certain moment. In theory, it will have a long-term perspective, producing a more effective recommendation. The special requirements of reinfor…
We motivate the need for recommendation systems that can cater to the members in-the-moment intent by leveraging their interactions from the current session. We provide an overview of an end-to-end in-session adaptive recommendations system in the context of Netflix Search. We discuss the challenges and potential solutions when developing such a system at production scale.
Information retrieval (IR) systems often leverage query data to suggest relevant items to users. This introduces the possibility of unfairness if the query (i.e., input) and the resulting recommendations unintentionally correlate with latent factors that are protected variables (e.g., race, gender, and age). For instance, a visual search system for fashion recommendations may pick up on features of the human models rather than fashion garments when generating recommendations. In this work, we introduce a statistical test for "distribution parity" in the top-K IR results, which assesses whether…
In the travel industry, online customers book their travel itinerary according to several features, like cost and duration of the travel or the quality of amenities. To provide personalized recommendations for travel searches, an appropriate segmentation of customers is required. Clustering ensemble approaches were developed to overcome well-known problems of classical clustering approaches, that each rely on a different theoretical model and can thus identify in the data space only clusters corresponding to this model. Clustering ensemble approaches combine multiple clustering results, each f…
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Regenstrief Institute（雷根斯特里夫研究所）；Indiana University School of Medicine（印第安纳大学医学院）
With increasing and extensive use of electronic health records, clinicians are often under time pressure when they need to retrieve important information efficiently among large amounts of patients' health records in clinics. While a search function can be a useful alternative to browsing through a patient's record, it is cumbersome for clinicians to search repeatedly for the same or similar information on similar patients. Under such circumstances, there is a critical need to build effective recommender systems that can generate accurate search term recommendations for clinicians. In this man…
Using computational notebooks (e.g., Jupyter Notebook), data scientists rationalize their exploratory data analysis (EDA) based on their prior experience and external knowledge such as online examples. For novices or data scientists who lack specific knowledge about the dataset or problem to investigate, effectively obtaining and understanding the external information is critical to carry out EDA. This paper presents EDAssistant, a JupyterLab extension that supports EDA with in-situ search of example notebooks and recommendation of useful APIs, powered by novel interactive visualization of sea…
Over the past 10 years, many recommendation techniques have been based on embedding users and items in latent vector spaces, where the inner product of a (user,item) pair of vectors represents the predicted affinity of the user to the item. A wealth of literature has focused on the various modeling approaches that result in embeddings, and has compared their quality metrics, learning complexity, etc. However, much less attention has been devoted to the issues surrounding productization of an embeddings-based high throughput, low latency recommender system. In particular, how the system might k…
We present a framework for quantifying and mitigating algorithmic bias in mechanisms designed for ranking individuals, typically used as part of web-scale search and recommendation systems. We first propose complementary measures to quantify bias with respect to protected attributes such as gender and age. We then present algorithms for computing fairness-aware re-ranking of results. For a given search or recommendation task, our algorithms seek to achieve a desired distribution of top ranked results with respect to one or more protected attributes. We show that such a framework can be tailore…
Recently, deep learning models have been widely spread in the industrial recommender systems and boosted the recommendation quality. Though having achieved remarkable success, the design of task-aware recommender systems usually requires manual feature engineering and architecture engineering from domain experts. To relieve those human efforts, we explore the potential of neural architecture search (NAS) and introduce AMEIR for Automatic behavior Modeling, interaction Exploration and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) Investigation in the Recommender system. The core contributions of AMEIR are the t…
Entity recommendation, providing search users with an improved experience via assisting them in finding related entities for a given query, has become an indispensable feature of today's search engines. Existing studies typically only consider the queries with explicit entities. They usually fail to handle complex queries that without entities, such as "what food is good for cold weather", because their models could not infer the underlying meaning of the input text. In this work, we believe that contexts convey valuable evidence that could facilitate the semantic modeling of queries, and take…
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist)（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心（BNRist））；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
In the past decade, the heterogeneous information network (HIN) has become an important methodology for modern recommender systems. To fully leverage its power, manually designed network templates, i.e., meta-structures, are introduced to filter out semantic-aware information. The hand-crafted meta-structure rely on intense expert knowledge, which is both laborious and data-dependent. On the other hand, the number of meta-structures grows exponentially with its size and the number of node types, which prohibits brute-force search. To address these challenges, we propose Genetic Meta-Structure …
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Bytedance（字节跳动）
Designing an effective loss function plays a crucial role in training deep recommender systems. Most existing works often leverage a predefined and fixed loss function that could lead to suboptimal recommendation quality and training efficiency. Some recent efforts rely on exhaustively or manually searched weights to fuse a group of candidate loss functions, which is exceptionally costly in computation and time. They also neglect the various convergence behaviors of different data examples. In this work, we propose an AutoLoss framework that can automatically and adaptively search for the appr…
How data is represented and operationalized is critical for building computational solutions that are both effective and efficient. A common approach is to represent data objects as binary vectors, denoted \textit{hash codes}, which require little storage and enable efficient similarity search through direct indexing into a hash table or through similarity computations in an appropriate space. Due to the limited expressibility of hash codes, compared to real-valued representations, a core open challenge is how to generate hash codes that well capture semantic content or latent properties using…
From Prompting to Alignment: A Generative Framework for Query Recommendation
Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；National Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, Peking University（北京大学多媒体信息处理国家重点实验室）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Model-based methods for recommender systems have been studied extensively for years. Modern recommender systems usually resort to 1) representation learning models which define user-item preference as the distance between their embedding representations, and 2) embedding-based Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search to tackle the efficiency problem introduced by large-scale corpus. While providing efficient retrieval, the embedding-based retrieval pattern also limits the model capacity since the form of user-item preference measure is restricted to the distance between their embedding repres…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
The search space of neural architecture search (NAS) for convolutional neural network (CNN) is huge. To reduce searching cost, most NAS algorithms use fixed outer network level structure, and search the repeatable cell structure only. Such kind of fixed architecture performs well when enough cells and channels are used. However, when the architecture becomes more lightweight, the performance decreases significantly. To obtain better lightweight architectures, more flexible and diversified neural architectures are in demand, and more efficient methods should be designed for larger search space.…
University of Westminster（威斯敏斯特大学）；Informatics Institute of Technology（信息技术学院）
This research explores the methods that NFTs can be recommended to people who interact with NFT-marketplaces to explore NFTs of preference and similarity to what they have been searching for. While exploring past methods that can be adopted for recommendations, the use of NFT traits for recommendations has been explored. The outcome of the research highlights the necessity of using multiple Recommender Systems to present the user with the best possible NFTs when interacting with decentralized systems.
Hyperparameter optimization is the process of identifying the appropriate hyperparameter configuration of a given machine learning model with regard to a given learning task. For smaller data sets, an exhaustive search is possible; However, when the data size and model complexity increase, the number of configuration evaluations becomes the main computational bottleneck. A promising paradigm for tackling this type of problem is surrogate-based optimization. The main idea underlying this paradigm considers an incrementally updated model of the relation between the hyperparameter space and the o…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
Personalized Route Recommendation (PRR) aims to generate user-specific route suggestions in response to users' route queries. Early studies cast the PRR task as a pathfinding problem on graphs, and adopt adapted search algorithms by integrating heuristic strategies. Although these methods are effective to some extent, they require setting the cost functions with heuristics. In addition, it is difficult to utilize useful context information in the search procedure. To address these issues, we propose using neural networks to automatically learn the cost functions of a classic heuristic algorith…
