A Practical Approach for Building Production-Grade Conversational Agents with Workflow Graphs

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant improvements in various service domains, including search, recommendation, and chatbot applications. However, applying state-of-the-art (SOTA) research to industrial settings presents challenges, as it requires maintaining flexible conversational abilities while also strictly complying with service-specific constraints. This can be seen as two conflicting requirements due to the probabilistic nature of LLMs. In this paper, we propose our approach to addressing this challenge and detail the strategies we employed to overcome their inherent limitations in real-world applications. We conduct a practical case study of a conversational agent designed for the e-commerce domain, detailing our implementation workflow and optimizations. Our findings provide insights into bridging the gap between academic research and real-world application, introducing a framework for developing scalable, controllable, and reliable AI-driven agents.

Enhancing VAEs for Collaborative Filtering: Flexible Priors & Gating Mechanisms

Neural network based models for collaborative filtering have started to gain attention recently. One branch of research is based on using deep generative models to model user preferences where variational autoencoders were shown to produce state-of-the-art results. However, there are some potentially problematic characteristics of the current variational autoencoder for CF. The first is the too simplistic prior that VAEs incorporate for learning the latent representations of user preference. The other is the model's inability to learn deeper representations with more than one hidden layer for each network. Our goal is to incorporate appropriate techniques to mitigate the aforementioned problems of variational autoencoder CF and further improve the recommendation performance. Our work is the first to apply flexible priors to collaborative filtering and show that simple priors (in original VAEs) may be too restrictive to fully model user preferences and setting a more flexible prior gives significant gains. We experiment with the VampPrior, originally proposed for image generation, to examine the effect of flexible priors in CF. We also show that VampPriors coupled with gating mechanisms outperform SOTA results including the Variational Autoencoder for Collaborative Filtering by meaningful margins on 2 popular benchmark datasets (MovieLens & Netflix).