On Manipulating Signals of User-Item Graph: A Jacobi Polynomial-based Graph Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) is an important research direction in recommender systems that aims to make recommendations given the information on user-item interactions. Graph CF has attracted more and more attention in recent years due to its effectiveness in leveraging high-order information in the user-item bipartite graph for better recommendations. Specifically, recent studies show the success of graph neural networks (GNN) for CF is attributed to its low-pass filtering effects. However, current researches lack a study of how different signal components contributes to recommendations, and how to design strategies to properly use them well. To this end, from the view of spectral transformation, we analyze the important factors that a graph filter should consider to achieve better performance. Based on the discoveries, we design JGCF, an efficient and effective method for CF based on Jacobi polynomial bases and frequency decomposition strategies. Extensive experiments on four widely used public datasets show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods, which brings at most 27.06% performance gain on Alibaba-iFashion. Besides, the experimental results also show that JGCF is better at handling sparse datasets, which shows potential in making recommendations for cold-start users.

Auto-Validate by-History: Auto-Program Data Quality Constraints to Validate Recurring Data Pipelines

Data pipelines are widely employed in modern enterprises to power a variety of Machine-Learning (ML) and Business-Intelligence (BI) applications. Crucially, these pipelines are \emph{recurring} (e.g., daily or hourly) in production settings to keep data updated so that ML models can be re-trained regularly, and BI dashboards refreshed frequently. However, data quality (DQ) issues can often creep into recurring pipelines because of upstream schema and data drift over time. As modern enterprises operate thousands of recurring pipelines, today data engineers have to spend substantial efforts to \emph{manually} monitor and resolve DQ issues, as part of their DataOps and MLOps practices. Given the high human cost of managing large-scale pipeline operations, it is imperative that we can \emph{automate} as much as possible. In this work, we propose Auto-Validate-by-History (AVH) that can automatically detect DQ issues in recurring pipelines, leveraging rich statistics from historical executions. We formalize this as an optimization problem, and develop constant-factor approximation algorithms with provable precision guarantees. Extensive evaluations using 2000 production data pipelines at Microsoft demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of AVH.

Leveraging LLMs for KPIs Retrieval from Hybrid Long-Document: A Comprehensive Framework and Dataset

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in textual understanding and tabular reasoning tasks. However, their ability to comprehend and analyze hybrid text, containing textual and tabular data, remains underexplored. In this research, we specialize in harnessing the potential of LLMs to comprehend critical information from financial reports, which are hybrid long-documents. We propose an Automated Financial Information Extraction (AFIE) framework that enhances LLMs' ability to comprehend and extract information from financial reports. To evaluate AFIE, we develop a Financial Reports Numerical Extraction (FINE) dataset and conduct an extensive experimental analysis. Our framework is effectively validated on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, yielding average accuracy increases of 53.94% and 33.77%, respectively, compared to a naive method. These results suggest that the AFIE framework offers accuracy for automated numerical extraction from complex, hybrid documents.

Evaluating and Enhancing Structural Understanding Capabilities of Large Language Models on Tables via Input Designs

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming attractive as few-shot reasoners to solve NL-related tasks. However, there is still much to be learned about how well LLMs understand structured data, such as tables. While it is true that tables can be used as inputs to LLMs with serialization, there lack comprehensive studies examining whether LLMs can truly comprehend such data. In this paper we try to understand this by designing a benchmark to evaluate structural understanding capabilities (SUC) of LLMs. The benchmark we create includes seven tasks, each with their own unique challenges, e.g,, cell lookup, row retrieval and size detection. We run a series of evaluations on GPT-3 family models (e.g., text-davinci-003). We discover that the performance varied depending on a number of input choices, including table input format, content order, role prompting and partition marks. Drawing from the insights gained through the benchmark evaluations, we then propose self-augmentation for effective structural prompting, e.g., critical value / range identification using LLMs' internal knowledge. When combined with carefully chosen input choices, these structural prompting methods lead to promising improvements in LLM performance on a variety of tabular tasks, e.g., TabFact($\uparrow2.31\%$), HybridQA($\uparrow2.13\%$), SQA($\uparrow2.72\%$), Feverous($\uparrow0.84\%$), and ToTTo($\uparrow5.68\%$). We believe our benchmark and proposed prompting methods can serve as a simple yet generic selection for future research. The code and data are released in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/StructuredLLM-76F3.

Introspective Tips: Large Language Model for In-Context Decision Making

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.

Empower Large Language Model to Perform Better on Industrial Domain-Specific Question Answering

Large Language Model (LLM) has gained popularity and achieved remarkable results in open-domain tasks, but its performance in real industrial domain-specific scenarios is average since there is no specific knowledge in it. This issue has attracted widespread attention, but there are few relevant benchmarks available. In this paper, we provide a benchmark Question Answering (QA) dataset named MSQA, which is about Microsoft products and IT technical problems encountered by customers. This dataset contains industry cloud-specific QA knowledge, which is not available for general LLM, so it is well suited for evaluating methods aimed at improving domain-specific capabilities of LLM. In addition, we propose a new model interaction paradigm that can empower LLM to achieve better performance on domain-specific tasks where it is not proficient. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the approach following our model fusion framework outperforms the commonly used LLM with retrieval methods.

How Do In-Context Examples Affect Compositional Generalization?

Compositional generalization--understanding unseen combinations of seen primitives--is an essential reasoning capability in human intelligence. The AI community mainly studies this capability by fine-tuning neural networks on lots of training samples, while it is still unclear whether and how in-context learning--the prevailing few-shot paradigm based on large language models--exhibits compositional generalization. In this paper, we present CoFe, a test suite to investigate in-context compositional generalization. We find that the compositional generalization performance can be easily affected by the selection of in-context examples, thus raising the research question what the key factors are to make good in-context examples for compositional generalization. We study three potential factors: similarity, diversity and complexity. Our systematic experiments indicate that in-context examples should be structurally similar to the test case, diverse from each other, and individually simple. Furthermore, two strong limitations are observed: in-context compositional generalization on fictional words is much weaker than that on commonly used ones; it is still critical that the in-context examples should cover required linguistic structures, even though the backbone model has been pre-trained on large corpus. We hope our analysis would facilitate the understanding and utilization of in-context learning paradigm.

Towards Efficient Fine-tuning of Pre-trained Code Models: An Experimental Study and Beyond

Recently, fine-tuning pre-trained code models such as CodeBERT on downstream tasks has achieved great success in many software testing and analysis tasks. While effective and prevalent, fine-tuning the pre-trained parameters incurs a large computational cost. In this paper, we conduct an extensive experimental study to explore what happens to layer-wise pre-trained representations and their encoded code knowledge during fine-tuning. We then propose efficient alternatives to fine-tune the large pre-trained code model based on the above findings. Our experimental study shows that (1) lexical, syntactic and structural properties of source code are encoded in the lower, intermediate, and higher layers, respectively, while the semantic property spans across the entire model. (2) The process of fine-tuning preserves most of the code properties. Specifically, the basic code properties captured by lower and intermediate layers are still preserved during fine-tuning. Furthermore, we find that only the representations of the top two layers change most during fine-tuning for various downstream tasks. (3) Based on the above findings, we propose Telly to efficiently fine-tune pre-trained code models via layer freezing. The extensive experimental results on five various downstream tasks demonstrate that training parameters and the corresponding time cost are greatly reduced, while performances are similar or better. Replication package including source code, datasets, and online Appendix is available at: \url{https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/Telly}.

Demonstration of InsightPilot: An LLM-Empowered Automated Data Exploration System

Exploring data is crucial in data analysis, as it helps users understand and interpret the data more effectively. However, performing effective data exploration requires in-depth knowledge of the dataset and expertise in data analysis techniques. Not being familiar with either can create obstacles that make the process time-consuming and overwhelming for data analysts. To address this issue, we introduce InsightPilot, an LLM (Large Language Model)-based, automated data exploration system designed to simplify the data exploration process. InsightPilot automatically selects appropriate analysis intents, such as understanding, summarizing, and explaining. Then, these analysis intents are concretized by issuing corresponding intentional queries (IQueries) to create a meaningful and coherent exploration sequence. In brief, an IQuery is an abstraction and automation of data analysis operations, which mimics the approach of data analysts and simplifies the exploration process for users. By employing an LLM to iteratively collaborate with a state-of-the-art insight engine via IQueries, InsightPilot is effective in analyzing real-world datasets, enabling users to gain valuable insights through natural language inquiries. We demonstrate the effectiveness of InsightPilot in a case study, showing how it can help users gain valuable insights from their datasets.

LayoutDiffusion: Improving Graphic Layout Generation by Discrete Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Creating graphic layouts is a fundamental step in graphic designs. In this work, we present a novel generative model named LayoutDiffusion for automatic layout generation. As layout is typically represented as a sequence of discrete tokens, LayoutDiffusion models layout generation as a discrete denoising diffusion process. It learns to reverse a mild forward process, in which layouts become increasingly chaotic with the growth of forward steps and layouts in the neighboring steps do not differ too much. Designing such a mild forward process is however very challenging as layout has both categorical attributes and ordinal attributes. To tackle the challenge, we summarize three critical factors for achieving a mild forward process for the layout, i.e., legality, coordinate proximity and type disruption. Based on the factors, we propose a block-wise transition matrix coupled with a piece-wise linear noise schedule. Experiments on RICO and PubLayNet datasets show that LayoutDiffusion outperforms state-of-the-art approaches significantly. Moreover, it enables two conditional layout generation tasks in a plug-and-play manner without re-training and achieves better performance than existing methods.