Enhanced Bayesian Personalized Ranking for Robust Hard Negative Sampling in Recommender Systems

In implicit collaborative filtering, hard negative mining techniques are developed to accelerate and enhance the recommendation model learning. However, the inadvertent selection of false negatives remains a major concern in hard negative sampling, as these false negatives can provide incorrect information and mislead the model learning. To date, only a small number of studies have been committed to solve the false negative problem, primarily focusing on designing sophisticated sampling algorithms to filter false negatives. In contrast, this paper shifts its focus to refining the loss function. We find that the original Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR), initially designed for uniform negative sampling, is inadequate in adapting to hard sampling scenarios. Hence, we introduce an enhanced Bayesian Personalized Ranking objective, named as Hard-BPR, which is specifically crafted for dynamic hard negative sampling to mitigate the influence of false negatives. This method is simple yet efficient for real-world deployment. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach, along with the enhanced ability to distinguish false negatives.

Extreme Parkour with Legged Robots

Humans can perform parkour by traversing obstacles in a highly dynamic fashion requiring precise eye-muscle coordination and movement. Getting robots to do the same task requires overcoming similar challenges. Classically, this is done by independently engineering perception, actuation, and control systems to very low tolerances. This restricts them to tightly controlled settings such as a predetermined obstacle course in labs. In contrast, humans are able to learn parkour through practice without significantly changing their underlying biology. In this paper, we take a similar approach to developing robot parkour on a small low-cost robot with imprecise actuation and a single front-facing depth camera for perception which is low-frequency, jittery, and prone to artifacts. We show how a single neural net policy operating directly from a camera image, trained in simulation with large-scale RL, can overcome imprecise sensing and actuation to output highly precise control behavior end-to-end. We show our robot can perform a high jump on obstacles 2x its height, long jump across gaps 2x its length, do a handstand and run across tilted ramps, and generalize to novel obstacle courses with different physical properties. Parkour videos at https://extreme-parkour.github.io/

Soft BPR Loss for Dynamic Hard Negative Sampling in Recommender Systems

In recommender systems, leveraging Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to formulate the bipartite relation between users and items is a promising way. However, powerful negative sampling methods that is adapted to GNN-based recommenders still requires a lot of efforts. One critical gap is that it is rather tough to distinguish real negatives from massive unobserved items during hard negative sampling. Towards this problem, this paper develops a novel hard negative sampling method for GNN-based recommendation systems by simply reformulating the loss function. We conduct various experiments on three datasets, demonstrating that the method proposed outperforms a set of state-of-the-art benchmarks.

Learning Perception-Aware Agile Flight in Cluttered Environments

Recently, neural control policies have outperformed existing model-based planning-and-control methods for autonomously navigating quadrotors through cluttered environments in minimum time. However, they are not perception aware, a crucial requirement in vision-based navigation due to the camera's limited field of view and the underactuated nature of a quadrotor. We propose a method to learn neural network policies that achieve perception-aware, minimum-time flight in cluttered environments. Our method combines imitation learning and reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging a privileged learning-by-cheating framework. Using RL, we first train a perception-aware teacher policy with full-state information to fly in minimum time through cluttered environments. Then, we use imitation learning to distill its knowledge into a vision-based student policy that only perceives the environment via a camera. Our approach tightly couples perception and control, showing a significant advantage in computation speed (10x faster) and success rate. We demonstrate the closed-loop control performance using a physical quadrotor and hardware-in-the-loop simulation at speeds up to 50km/h.