EulerFormer: Sequential User Behavior Modeling with Complex Vector Attention

To capture user preference, transformer models have been widely applied to model sequential user behavior data. The core of transformer architecture lies in the self-attention mechanism, which computes the pairwise attention scores in a sequence. Due to the permutation-equivariant nature, positional encoding is used to enhance the attention between token representations. In this setting, the pairwise attention scores can be derived by both semantic difference and positional difference. However, prior studies often model the two kinds of difference measurements in different ways, which potentially limits the expressive capacity of sequence modeling. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel transformer variant with complex vector attention, named EulerFormer, which provides a unified theoretical framework to formulate both semantic difference and positional difference. The EulerFormer involves two key technical improvements. First, it employs a new transformation function for efficiently transforming the sequence tokens into polar-form complex vectors using Euler's formula, enabling the unified modeling of both semantic and positional information in a complex rotation form.Secondly, it develops a differential rotation mechanism, where the semantic rotation angles can be controlled by an adaptation function, enabling the adaptive integration of the semantic and positional information according to the semantic contexts.Furthermore, a phase contrastive learning task is proposed to improve the isotropy of contextual representations in EulerFormer. Our theoretical framework possesses a high degree of completeness and generality. It is more robust to semantic variations and possesses moresuperior theoretical properties in principle. Extensive experiments conducted on four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

AFSPP: Agent Framework for Shaping Preference and Personality with Large Language Models

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced a new paradigm for investigating human behavior emulation. Recent research has employed LLM-based Agents to create a sociological research environment, in which agents exhibit behavior based on the unfiltered characteristics of large language models. However, these studies overlook the iterative development within a human-like setting - Human preferences and personalities are complex, shaped by various factors and subject to ongoing change as a result of environmental and subjective influences. In light of this observation, we propose Agent Framework for Shaping Preference and Personality (AFSPP), exploring the multifaceted impact of social networks and subjective consciousness on LLM-based Agents' preference and personality formation. With AFSPP, we have, for the first time, successfully replicated several key findings from human personality experiments. And other AFSPP-based experimental results indicate that plan making, sensory perceptions and social networking with subjective information, wield the most pronounced influence on preference shaping. AFSPP can significantly enhance the efficiency and scope of psychological experiments, while yielding valuable insights for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence research for strategies to prevent undesirable preference and personality development.

UFIN: Universal Feature Interaction Network for Multi-Domain Click-Through Rate Prediction

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction, which aims to estimate the probability of a user clicking on an item, is a key task in online advertising. Numerous existing CTR models concentrate on modeling the feature interactions within a solitary domain, thereby rendering them inadequate for fulfilling the requisites of multi-domain recommendations in real industrial scenarios. Some recent approaches propose intricate architectures to enhance knowledge sharing and augment model training across multiple domains. However, these approaches encounter difficulties when being transferred to new recommendation domains, owing to their reliance on the modeling of ID features (e.g., item id). To address the above issue, we propose the Universal Feature Interaction Network (UFIN) approach for CTR prediction. UFIN exploits textual data to learn universal feature interactions that can be effectively transferred across diverse domains. For learning universal feature representations, we regard the text and feature as two different modalities and propose an encoder-decoder network founded on a Large Language Model (LLM) to enforce the transfer of data from the text modality to the feature modality. Building upon the above foundation, we further develop a mixtureof-experts (MoE) enhanced adaptive feature interaction model to learn transferable collaborative patterns across multiple domains. Furthermore, we propose a multi-domain knowledge distillation framework to enhance feature interaction learning. Based on the above methods, UFIN can effectively bridge the semantic gap to learn common knowledge across various domains, surpassing the constraints of ID-based models. Extensive experiments conducted on eight datasets show the effectiveness of UFIN, in both multidomain and cross-platform settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/UFIN.

HIEN: Hierarchical Intention Embedding Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays an important role in online advertising and recommendation systems, which aims at estimating the probability of a user clicking on a specific item. Feature interaction modeling and user interest modeling methods are two popular domains in CTR prediction, and they have been studied extensively in recent years. However, these methods still suffer from two limitations. First, traditional methods regard item attributes as ID features, while neglecting structure information and relation dependencies among attributes. Second, when mining user interests from user-item interactions, current models ignore user intents and item intents for different attributes, which lacks interpretability. Based on this observation, in this paper, we propose a novel approach Hierarchical Intention Embedding Network (HIEN), which considers dependencies of attributes based on bottom-up tree aggregation in the constructed attribute graph. HIEN also captures user intents for different item attributes as well as item intents based on our proposed hierarchical attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on both public and production datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, HIEN can be applied as an input module to state-of-the-art CTR prediction methods, bringing further performance lift for these existing models that might already be intensively used in real systems.

Multi-view Clustering via Deep Matrix Factorization and Partition Alignment

Multi-view clustering (MVC) has been extensively studied to collect multiple source information in recent years. One typical type of MVC methods is based on matrix factorization to effectively perform dimension reduction and clustering. However, the existing approaches can be further improved with following considerations: i) The current one-layer matrix factorization framework cannot fully exploit the useful data representations. ii) Most algorithms only focus on the shared information while ignore the view-specific structure leading to suboptimal solutions. iii) The partition level information has not been utilized in existing work. To solve the above issues, we propose a novel multi-view clustering algorithm via deep matrix decomposition and partition alignment. To be specific, the partition representations of each view are obtained through deep matrix decomposition, and then are jointly utilized with the optimal partition representation for fusing multi-view information. Finally, an alternating optimization algorithm is developed to solve the optimization problem with proven convergence. The comprehensive experimental results conducted on six benchmark multi-view datasets clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm against the SOTA methods.

Multi-view Clustering with Deep Matrix Factorization and Global Graph Refinement

Multi-view clustering is an important yet challenging task in machine learning and data mining community. One popular strategy for multi-view clustering is matrix factorization which could explore useful feature representations at lower-dimensional space and therefore alleviate dimension curse. However, there are two major drawbacks in the existing work: i) most matrix factorization methods are limited to shadow depth, which leads to the inability to fully discover the rich hidden information of original data. Few deep matrix factorization methods provide a basis for the selection of the new representation's dimensions of different layers. ii) the majority of current approaches only concentrate on the view-shared information and ignore the specific local features in different views. To tackle the above issues, we propose a novel Multi-View Clustering method with Deep semi-NMF and Global Graph Refinement (MVC-DMF-GGR) in this paper. Firstly, we capture new representation matrices for each view by hierarchical decomposition, then learn a common graph by approximating a combination of graphs which are reconstructed from these new representations to refine the new representations in return. An alternate algorithm with proved convergence is then developed to solve the optimization problem and the results on six multi-view benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed algorithm.