Democratizing Large Language Models via Personalized Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning

Personalization in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly important, aiming to align LLM's interactions, content, and recommendations with individual user preferences. Recent advances in LLM personalization have spotlighted effective prompt design, by enriching user queries with non-parametric knowledge through behavior history retrieval and textual profiles. However, these approaches were limited due to a lack of model ownership, resulting in constrained customization and privacy issues. Moreover, they often failed to accurately capture user behavior patterns, especially in cases where user data were complex and dynamic. To address these shortcomings, we introduce One PEFT Per User (OPPU), which employs personalized parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) modules, to store user-specific behavior patterns and preferences. By plugging in users' personal PEFT parameters, they can own and use their LLMs personally. OPPU integrates parametric user knowledge in the personal PEFT parameters with the non-parametric knowledge acquired through retrieval and profile. This integration adapts individual LLMs to user behavior shifts. Experimental results demonstrate that OPPU significantly outperforms existing prompt-based methods across seven diverse tasks in the LaMP benchmark. Further in-depth studies reveal OPPU's enhanced capabilities in handling user behavior shifts, modeling users at different active levels, maintaining robustness across various user history formats, and displaying versatility with different PEFT methods.

Enhancing User Intent Capture in Session-Based Recommendation with Attribute Patterns

The goal of session-based recommendation in E-commerce is to predict the next item that an anonymous user will purchase based on the browsing and purchase history. However, constructing global or local transition graphs to supplement session data can lead to noisy correlations and user intent vanishing. In this work, we propose the Frequent Attribute Pattern Augmented Transformer (FAPAT) that characterizes user intents by building attribute transition graphs and matching attribute patterns. Specifically, the frequent and compact attribute patterns are served as memory to augment session representations, followed by a gate and a transformer block to fuse the whole session information. Through extensive experiments on two public benchmarks and 100 million industrial data in three domains, we demonstrate that FAPAT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by an average of 4.5% across various evaluation metrics (Hits, NDCG, MRR). Besides evaluating the next-item prediction, we estimate the models' capabilities to capture user intents via predicting items' attributes and period-item recommendations.

1DFormer: Learning 1D Landmark Representations via Transformer for Facial Landmark Tracking

Recently, heatmap regression methods based on 1D landmark representations have shown prominent performance on locating facial landmarks. However, previous methods ignored to make deep explorations on the good potentials of 1D landmark representations for sequential and structural modeling of multiple landmarks to track facial landmarks. To address this limitation, we propose a Transformer architecture, namely 1DFormer, which learns informative 1D landmark representations by capturing the dynamic and the geometric patterns of landmarks via token communications in both temporal and spatial dimensions for facial landmark tracking. For temporal modeling, we propose a recurrent token mixing mechanism, an axis-landmark-positional embedding mechanism, as well as a confidence-enhanced multi-head attention mechanism to adaptively and robustly embed long-term landmark dynamics into their 1D representations; for structure modeling, we design intra-group and inter-group structure modeling mechanisms to encode the component-level as well as global-level facial structure patterns as a refinement for the 1D representations of landmarks through token communications in the spatial dimension via 1D convolutional layers. Experimental results on the 300VW and the TF databases show that 1DFormer successfully models the long-range sequential patterns as well as the inherent facial structures to learn informative 1D representations of landmark sequences, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on facial landmark tracking.

Situated Natural Language Explanations

Natural language is among the most accessible tools for explaining decisions to humans, and large pretrained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities to generate coherent natural language explanations (NLE). The existing NLE research perspectives do not take the audience into account. An NLE can have high textual quality, but it might not accommodate audiences' needs and preference. To address this limitation, we propose an alternative perspective, situated NLE, including a situated generation framework and a situated evaluation framework. On the generation side, we propose simple prompt engineering methods that adapt the NLEs to situations. In human studies, the annotators preferred the situated NLEs. On the evaluation side, we set up automated evaluation scores in lexical, semantic, and pragmatic categories. The scores can be used to select the most suitable prompts to generate NLEs. Situated NLE provides a perspective to conduct further research on automatic NLE generations.

Exploring Part-Informed Visual-Language Learning for Person Re-Identification

Recently, visual-language learning has shown great potential in enhancing visual-based person re-identification (ReID). Existing visual-language learning-based ReID methods often focus on whole-body scale image-text feature alignment, while neglecting supervisions on fine-grained part features. This choice simplifies the learning process but cannot guarantee within-part feature semantic consistency thus hindering the final performance. Therefore, we propose to enhance fine-grained visual features with part-informed language supervision for ReID tasks. The proposed method, named Part-Informed Visual-language Learning ($\pi$-VL), suggests that (i) a human parsing-guided prompt tuning strategy and (ii) a hierarchical fusion-based visual-language alignment paradigm play essential roles in ensuring within-part feature semantic consistency. Specifically, we combine both identity labels and parsing maps to constitute pixel-level text prompts and fuse multi-stage visual features with a light-weight auxiliary head to perform fine-grained image-text alignment. As a plug-and-play and inference-free solution, our $\pi$-VL achieves substantial improvements over previous state-of-the-arts on four common-used ReID benchmarks, especially reporting 90.3% Rank-1 and 76.5% mAP for the most challenging MSMT17 database without bells and whistles.

Amazon-M2: A Multilingual Multi-locale Shopping Session Dataset for Recommendation and Text Generation

Modeling customer shopping intentions is a crucial task for e-commerce, as it directly impacts user experience and engagement. Thus, accurately understanding customer preferences is essential for providing personalized recommendations. Session-based recommendation, which utilizes customer session data to predict their next interaction, has become increasingly popular. However, existing session datasets have limitations in terms of item attributes, user diversity, and dataset scale. As a result, they cannot comprehensively capture the spectrum of user behaviors and preferences. To bridge this gap, we present the Amazon Multilingual Multi-locale Shopping Session Dataset, namely Amazon-M2. It is the first multilingual dataset consisting of millions of user sessions from six different locales, where the major languages of products are English, German, Japanese, French, Italian, and Spanish. Remarkably, the dataset can help us enhance personalization and understanding of user preferences, which can benefit various existing tasks as well as enable new tasks. To test the potential of the dataset, we introduce three tasks in this work: (1) next-product recommendation, (2) next-product recommendation with domain shifts, and (3) next-product title generation. With the above tasks, we benchmark a range of algorithms on our proposed dataset, drawing new insights for further research and practice. In addition, based on the proposed dataset and tasks, we hosted a competition in the KDD CUP 2023 and have attracted thousands of users and submissions. The winning solutions and the associated workshop can be accessed at our website https://kddcup23.github.io/.

Multimodal Prompt Learning for Product Title Generation with Extremely Limited Labels

Generating an informative and attractive title for the product is a crucial task for e-commerce. Most existing works follow the standard multimodal natural language generation approaches, e.g., image captioning, and employ the large scale of human-labelled datasets to train desirable models. However, for novel products, especially in a different domain, there are few existing labelled data. In this paper, we propose a prompt-based approach, i.e., the Multimodal Prompt Learning framework, to accurately and efficiently generate titles for novel products with limited labels. We observe that the core challenges of novel product title generation are the understanding of novel product characteristics and the generation of titles in a novel writing style. To this end, we build a set of multimodal prompts from different modalities to preserve the corresponding characteristics and writing styles of novel products. As a result, with extremely limited labels for training, the proposed method can retrieve the multimodal prompts to generate desirable titles for novel products. The experiments and analyses are conducted on five novel product categories under both the in-domain and out-of-domain experimental settings. The results show that, with only 1% of downstream labelled data for training, our proposed approach achieves the best few-shot results and even achieves competitive results with fully-supervised methods trained on 100% of training data; With the full labelled data for training, our method achieves state-of-the-art results.

Weakly Supervised Scene Text Generation for Low-resource Languages

A large number of annotated training images is crucial for training successful scene text recognition models. However, collecting sufficient datasets can be a labor-intensive and costly process, particularly for low-resource languages. To address this challenge, auto-generating text data has shown promise in alleviating the problem. Unfortunately, existing scene text generation methods typically rely on a large amount of paired data, which is difficult to obtain for low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised scene text generation method that leverages a few recognition-level labels as weak supervision. The proposed method is able to generate a large amount of scene text images with diverse backgrounds and font styles through cross-language generation. Our method disentangles the content and style features of scene text images, with the former representing textual information and the latter representing characteristics such as font, alignment, and background. To preserve the complete content structure of generated images, we introduce an integrated attention module. Furthermore, to bridge the style gap in the style of different languages, we incorporate a pre-trained font classifier. We evaluate our method using state-of-the-art scene text recognition models. Experiments demonstrate that our generated scene text significantly improves the scene text recognition accuracy and help achieve higher accuracy when complemented with other generative methods.

A Unified Framework of Graph Information Bottleneck for Robustness and Membership Privacy

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in modeling graph-structured data. However, recent works show that GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks which can fool the GNN model to make desired predictions of the attacker. In addition, training data of GNNs can be leaked under membership inference attacks. This largely hinders the adoption of GNNs in high-stake domains such as e-commerce, finance and bioinformatics. Though investigations have been made in conducting robust predictions and protecting membership privacy, they generally fail to simultaneously consider the robustness and membership privacy. Therefore, in this work, we study a novel problem of developing robust and membership privacy-preserving GNNs. Our analysis shows that Information Bottleneck (IB) can help filter out noisy information and regularize the predictions on labeled samples, which can benefit robustness and membership privacy. However, structural noises and lack of labels in node classification challenge the deployment of IB on graph-structured data. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel graph information bottleneck framework that can alleviate structural noises with neighbor bottleneck. Pseudo labels are also incorporated in the optimization to minimize the gap between the predictions on the labeled set and unlabeled set for membership privacy. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method can give robust predictions and simultaneously preserve membership privacy.

Knowledge Graph Reasoning over Entities and Numerical Values

A complex logic query in a knowledge graph refers to a query expressed in logic form that conveys a complex meaning, such as where did the Canadian Turing award winner graduate from? Knowledge graph reasoning-based applications, such as dialogue systems and interactive search engines, rely on the ability to answer complex logic queries as a fundamental task. In most knowledge graphs, edges are typically used to either describe the relationships between entities or their associated attribute values. An attribute value can be in categorical or numerical format, such as dates, years, sizes, etc. However, existing complex query answering (CQA) methods simply treat numerical values in the same way as they treat entities. This can lead to difficulties in answering certain queries, such as which Australian Pulitzer award winner is born before 1927, and which drug is a pain reliever and has fewer side effects than Paracetamol. In this work, inspired by the recent advances in numerical encoding and knowledge graph reasoning, we propose numerical complex query answering. In this task, we introduce new numerical variables and operations to describe queries involving numerical attribute values. To address the difference between entities and numerical values, we also propose the framework of Number Reasoning Network (NRN) for alternatively encoding entities and numerical values into separate encoding structures. During the numerical encoding process, NRN employs a parameterized density function to encode the distribution of numerical values. During the entity encoding process, NRN uses established query encoding methods for the original CQA problem. Experimental results show that NRN consistently improves various query encoding methods on three different knowledge graphs and achieves state-of-the-art results.