Empowering Sequential Recommendation from Collaborative Signals and Semantic Relatedness

Sequential recommender systems (SRS) could capture dynamic user preferences by modeling historical behaviors ordered in time. Despite effectiveness, focusing only on the \textit{collaborative signals} from behaviors does not fully grasp user interests. It is also significant to model the \textit{semantic relatedness} reflected in content features, e.g., images and text. Towards that end, in this paper, we aim to enhance the SRS tasks by effectively unifying collaborative signals and semantic relatedness together. Notably, we empirically point out that it is nontrivial to achieve such a goal due to semantic gap issues. Thus, we propose an end-to-end two-stream architecture for sequential recommendation, named TSSR, to learn user preferences from ID-based and content-based sequence. Specifically, we first present novel hierarchical contrasting module, including coarse user-grained and fine item-grained terms, to align the representations of inter-modality. Furthermore, we also design a two-stream architecture to learn the dependence of intra-modality sequence and the complex interactions of inter-modality sequence, which can yield more expressive capacity in understanding user interests. We conduct extensive experiments on five public datasets. The experimental results show that the TSSR could yield superior performance than competitive baselines. We also make our experimental codes publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TSSR-2A27/.

Graph Neural Network with Two Uplift Estimators for Label-Scarcity Individual Uplift Modeling

Uplift modeling aims to measure the incremental effect, which we call uplift, of a strategy or action on the users from randomized experiments or observational data. Most existing uplift methods only use individual data, which are usually not informative enough to capture the unobserved and complex hidden factors regarding the uplift. Furthermore, uplift modeling scenario usually has scarce labeled data, especially for the treatment group, which also poses a great challenge for model training. Considering that the neighbors' features and the social relationships are very informative to characterize a user's uplift, we propose a graph neural network-based framework with two uplift estimators, called GNUM, to learn from the social graph for uplift estimation. Specifically, we design the first estimator based on a class-transformed target. The estimator is general for all types of outcomes, and is able to comprehensively model the treatment and control group data together to approach the uplift. When the outcome is discrete, we further design the other uplift estimator based on our defined partial labels, which is able to utilize more labeled data from both the treatment and control groups, to further alleviate the label scarcity problem. Comprehensive experiments on a public dataset and two industrial datasets show a superior performance of our proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods under various evaluation metrics. The proposed algorithms have been deployed online to serve real-world uplift estimation scenarios.

Financial Default Prediction via Motif-preserving Graph Neural Network with Curriculum Learning

User financial default prediction plays a critical role in credit risk forecasting and management. It aims at predicting the probability that the user will fail to make the repayments in the future. Previous methods mainly extract a set of user individual features regarding his own profiles and behaviors and build a binary-classification model to make default predictions. However, these methods cannot get satisfied results, especially for users with limited information. Although recent efforts suggest that default prediction can be improved by social relations, they fail to capture the higher-order topology structure at the level of small subgraph patterns. In this paper, we fill in this gap by proposing a motif-preserving Graph Neural Network with curriculum learning (MotifGNN) to jointly learn the lower-order structures from the original graph and higherorder structures from multi-view motif-based graphs for financial default prediction. Specifically, to solve the problem of weak connectivity in motif-based graphs, we design the motif-based gating mechanism. It utilizes the information learned from the original graph with good connectivity to strengthen the learning of the higher-order structure. And considering that the motif patterns of different samples are highly unbalanced, we propose a curriculum learning mechanism on the whole learning process to more focus on the samples with uncommon motif distributions. Extensive experiments on one public dataset and two industrial datasets all demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

ChatUIE: Exploring Chat-based Unified Information Extraction using Large Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models have shown impressive performance in general chat. However, their domain-specific capabilities, particularly in information extraction, have certain limitations. Extracting structured information from natural language that deviates from known schemas or instructions has proven challenging for previous prompt-based methods. This motivated us to explore domain-specific modeling in chat-based language models as a solution for extracting structured information from natural language. In this paper, we present ChatUIE, an innovative unified information extraction framework built upon ChatGLM. Simultaneously, reinforcement learning is employed to improve and align various tasks that involve confusing and limited samples. Furthermore, we integrate generation constraints to address the issue of generating elements that are not present in the input. Our experimental results demonstrate that ChatUIE can significantly improve the performance of information extraction with a slight decrease in chatting ability.

Can Small Language Models be Good Reasoners for Sequential Recommendation?

Large language models (LLMs) open up new horizons for sequential recommendations, owing to their remarkable language comprehension and generation capabilities. However, there are still numerous challenges that should be addressed to successfully implement sequential recommendations empowered by LLMs. Firstly, user behavior patterns are often complex, and relying solely on one-step reasoning from LLMs may lead to incorrect or task-irrelevant responses. Secondly, the prohibitively resource requirements of LLM (e.g., ChatGPT-175B) are overwhelmingly high and impractical for real sequential recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a novel Step-by-step knowLedge dIstillation fraMework for recommendation (SLIM), paving a promising path for sequential recommenders to enjoy the exceptional reasoning capabilities of LLMs in a "slim" (i.e., resource-efficient) manner. We introduce CoT prompting based on user behavior sequences for the larger teacher model. The rationales generated by the teacher model are then utilized as labels to distill the downstream smaller student model (e.g., LLaMA2-7B). In this way, the student model acquires the step-by-step reasoning capabilities in recommendation tasks. We encode the generated rationales from the student model into a dense vector, which empowers recommendation in both ID-based and ID-agnostic scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SLIM over state-of-the-art baselines, and further analysis showcasing its ability to generate meaningful recommendation reasoning at affordable costs.

CMNER: A Chinese Multimodal NER Dataset based on Social Media

Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) is a pivotal task designed to extract named entities from text with the support of pertinent images. Nonetheless, a notable paucity of data for Chinese MNER has considerably impeded the progress of this natural language processing task within the Chinese domain. Consequently, in this study, we compile a Chinese Multimodal NER dataset (CMNER) utilizing data sourced from Weibo, China's largest social media platform. Our dataset encompasses 5,000 Weibo posts paired with 18,326 corresponding images. The entities are classified into four distinct categories: person, location, organization, and miscellaneous. We perform baseline experiments on CMNER, and the outcomes underscore the effectiveness of incorporating images for NER. Furthermore, we conduct cross-lingual experiments on the publicly available English MNER dataset (Twitter2015), and the results substantiate our hypothesis that Chinese and English multimodal NER data can mutually enhance the performance of the NER model.

Resolution-Agnostic Neural Compression for High-Fidelity Portrait Video Conferencing via Implicit Radiance Fields

Video conferencing has caught much more attention recently. High fidelity and low bandwidth are two major objectives of video compression for video conferencing applications. Most pioneering methods rely on classic video compression codec without high-level feature embedding and thus can not reach the extremely low bandwidth. Recent works instead employ model-based neural compression to acquire ultra-low bitrates using sparse representations of each frame such as facial landmark information, while these approaches can not maintain high fidelity due to 2D image-based warping. In this paper, we propose a novel low bandwidth neural compression approach for high-fidelity portrait video conferencing using implicit radiance fields to achieve both major objectives. We leverage dynamic neural radiance fields to reconstruct high-fidelity talking head with expression features, which are represented as frame substitution for transmission. The overall system employs deep model to encode expression features at the sender and reconstruct portrait at the receiver with volume rendering as decoder for ultra-low bandwidth. In particular, with the characteristic of neural radiance fields based model, our compression approach is resolution-agnostic, which means that the low bandwidth achieved by our approach is independent of video resolution, while maintaining fidelity for higher resolution reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that our novel framework can (1) construct ultra-low bandwidth video conferencing, (2) maintain high fidelity portrait and (3) have better performance on high-resolution video compression than previous works.

Enhancing Zero-shot Counting via Language-guided Exemplar Learning

Recently, Class-Agnostic Counting (CAC) problem has garnered increasing attention owing to its intriguing generality and superior efficiency compared to Category-Specific Counting (CSC). This paper proposes a novel ExpressCount to enhance zero-shot object counting by delving deeply into language-guided exemplar learning. Specifically, the ExpressCount is comprised of an innovative Language-oriented Exemplar Perceptron and a downstream visual Zero-shot Counting pipeline. Thereinto, the perceptron hammers at exploiting accurate exemplar cues from collaborative language-vision signals by inheriting rich semantic priors from the prevailing pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), whereas the counting pipeline excels in mining fine-grained features through dual-branch and cross-attention schemes, contributing to the high-quality similarity learning. Apart from building a bridge between the LLM in vogue and the visual counting tasks, expression-guided exemplar estimation significantly advances zero-shot learning capabilities for counting instances with arbitrary classes. Moreover, devising a FSC-147-Express with annotations of meticulous linguistic expressions pioneers a new venue for developing and validating language-based counting models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our ExpressCount, even showcasing the accuracy on par with partial CSC models.

XUAT-Copilot: Multi-Agent Collaborative System for Automated User Acceptance Testing with Large Language Model

In past years, we have been dedicated to automating user acceptance testing (UAT) process of WeChat Pay, one of the most influential mobile payment applications in China. A system titled XUAT has been developed for this purpose. However, there is still a human-labor-intensive stage, i.e, test scripts generation, in the current system. Therefore, in this paper, we concentrate on methods of boosting the automation level of the current system, particularly the stage of test scripts generation. With recent notable successes, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate significant potential in attaining human-like intelligence and there has been a growing research area that employs LLMs as autonomous agents to obtain human-like decision-making capabilities. Inspired by these works, we propose an LLM-powered multi-agent collaborative system, named XUAT-Copilot, for automated UAT. The proposed system mainly consists of three LLM-based agents responsible for action planning, state checking and parameter selecting, respectively, and two additional modules for state sensing and case rewriting. The agents interact with testing device, make human-like decision and generate action command in a collaborative way. The proposed multi-agent system achieves a close effectiveness to human testers in our experimental studies and gains a significant improvement of Pass@1 accuracy compared with single-agent architecture. More importantly, the proposed system has launched in the formal testing environment of WeChat Pay mobile app, which saves a considerable amount of manpower in the daily development work.