Modeling Spatiotemporal Periodicity and Collaborative Signal for Local-Life Service Recommendation

Online local-life service platforms provide services like nearby daily essentials and food delivery for hundreds of millions of users. Different from other types of recommender systems, local-life service recommendation has the following characteristics: (1) spatiotemporal periodicity, which means a user's preferences for items vary from different locations at different times. (2) spatiotemporal collaborative signal, which indicates similar users have similar preferences at specific locations and times. However, most existing methods either focus on merely the spatiotemporal contexts in sequences, or model the user-item interactions without spatiotemporal contexts in graphs. To address this issue, we design a new method named SPCS in this paper. Specifically, we propose a novel spatiotemporal graph transformer (SGT) layer, which explicitly encodes relative spatiotemporal contexts, and aggregates the information from multi-hop neighbors to unify spatiotemporal periodicity and collaborative signal. With extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets, this paper validates the state-of-the-art performance of SPCS.

KMF: Knowledge-Aware Multi-Faceted Representation Learning for Zero-Shot Node Classification

Recently, Zero-Shot Node Classification (ZNC) has been an emerging and crucial task in graph data analysis. This task aims to predict nodes from unseen classes which are unobserved in the training process. Existing work mainly utilizes Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to associate features' prototypes and labels' semantics thus enabling knowledge transfer from seen to unseen classes. However, the multi-faceted semantic orientation in the feature-semantic alignment has been neglected by previous work, i.e. the content of a node usually covers diverse topics that are relevant to the semantics of multiple labels. It's necessary to separate and judge the semantic factors that tremendously affect the cognitive ability to improve the generality of models. To this end, we propose a Knowledge-Aware Multi-Faceted framework (KMF) that enhances the richness of label semantics via the extracted KG (Knowledge Graph)-based topics. And then the content of each node is reconstructed to a topic-level representation that offers multi-faceted and fine-grained semantic relevancy to different labels. Due to the particularity of the graph's instance (i.e., node) representation, a novel geometric constraint is developed to alleviate the problem of prototype drift caused by node information aggregation. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on several public graph datasets and design an application of zero-shot cross-domain recommendation. The quantitative results demonstrate both the effectiveness and generalization of KMF with the comparison of state-of-the-art baselines.

CPDG: A Contrastive Pre-Training Method for Dynamic Graph Neural Networks

Dynamic graph data mining has gained popularity in recent years due to the rich information contained in dynamic graphs and their widespread use in the real world. Despite the advances in dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs), the rich information and diverse downstream tasks have posed significant difficulties for the practical application of DGNNs in industrial scenarios. To this end, in this paper, we propose to address them by pre-training and present the Contrastive Pre-Training Method for Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (CPDG). CPDG tackles the challenges of pre-training for DGNNs, including generalization capability and long-short term modeling capability, through a flexible structural-temporal subgraph sampler along with structural-temporal contrastive pre-training schemes. Extensive experiments conducted on both large-scale research and industrial dynamic graph datasets show that CPDG outperforms existing methods in dynamic graph pre-training for various downstream tasks under three transfer settings.

M2GNN: Metapath and Multi-interest Aggregated Graph Neural Network for Tag-based Cross-domain Recommendation

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) is an effective way to alleviate the data sparsity problem. Content-based CDR is one of the most promising branches since most kinds of products can be described by a piece of text, especially when cold-start users or items have few interactions. However, two vital issues are still under-explored: (1) From the content modeling perspective, sufficient long-text descriptions are usually scarce in a real recommender system, more often the light-weight textual features, such as a few keywords or tags, are more accessible, which is improperly modeled by existing methods. (2) From the CDR perspective, not all inter-domain interests are helpful to infer intra-domain interests. Caused by domain-specific features, there are part of signals benefiting for recommendation in the source domain but harmful for that in the target domain. Therefore, how to distill useful interests is crucial. To tackle the above two problems, we propose a metapath and multi-interest aggregated graph neural network (M2GNN). Specifically, to model the tag-based contents, we construct a heterogeneous information network to hold the semantic relatedness between users, items, and tags in all domains. The metapath schema is predefined according to domain-specific knowledge, with one metapath for one domain. User representations are learned by GNN with a hierarchical aggregation framework, where the intra-metapath aggregation firstly filters out trivial tags and the inter-metapath aggregation further filters out useless interests. Offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate that M2GNN achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods and current industrial recommender system in Dianping, respectively. Further analysis shows that M2GNN offers an interpretable recommendation.

GUESR: A Global Unsupervised Data-Enhancement with Bucket-Cluster Sampling for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential Recommendation is a widely studied paradigm for learning users' dynamic interests from historical interactions for predicting the next potential item. Although lots of research work has achieved remarkable progress, they are still plagued by the common issues: data sparsity of limited supervised signals and data noise of accidentally clicking. To this end, several works have attempted to address these issues, which ignored the complex association of items across several sequences. Along this line, with the aim of learning representative item embedding to alleviate this dilemma, we propose GUESR, from the view of graph contrastive learning. Specifically, we first construct the Global Item Relationship Graph (GIRG) from all interaction sequences and present the Bucket-Cluster Sampling (BCS) method to conduct the sub-graphs. Then, graph contrastive learning on this reduced graph is developed to enhance item representations with complex associations from the global view. We subsequently extend the CapsNet module with the elaborately introduced target-attention mechanism to derive users' dynamic preferences. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated our proposed GUESR could not only achieve significant improvements but also could be regarded as a general enhancement strategy to improve the performance in combination with other sequential recommendation methods.

Adaptive Fairness Improvement Based on Causality Analysis

Given a discriminating neural network, the problem of fairness improvement is to systematically reduce discrimination without significantly scarifies its performance (i.e., accuracy). Multiple categories of fairness improving methods have been proposed for neural networks, including pre-processing, in-processing and post-processing. Our empirical study however shows that these methods are not always effective (e.g., they may improve fairness by paying the price of huge accuracy drop) or even not helpful (e.g., they may even worsen both fairness and accuracy). In this work, we propose an approach which adaptively chooses the fairness improving method based on causality analysis. That is, we choose the method based on how the neurons and attributes responsible for unfairness are distributed among the input attributes and the hidden neurons. Our experimental evaluation shows that our approach is effective (i.e., always identify the best fairness improving method) and efficient (i.e., with an average time overhead of 5 minutes).

TESTSGD: Interpretable Testing of Neural Networks Against Subtle Group Discrimination

Discrimination has been shown in many machine learning applications, which calls for sufficient fairness testing before their deployment in ethic-relevant domains such as face recognition, medical diagnosis and criminal sentence. Existing fairness testing approaches are mostly designed for identifying individual discrimination, i.e., discrimination against individuals. Yet, as another widely concerning type of discrimination, testing against group discrimination, mostly hidden, is much less studied. To address the gap, in this work, we propose TESTSGD, an interpretable testing approach which systematically identifies and measures hidden (which we call `subtle' group discrimination} of a neural network characterized by conditions over combinations of the sensitive features. Specifically, given a neural network, TESTSGDfirst automatically generates an interpretable rule set which categorizes the input space into two groups exposing the model's group discrimination. Alongside, TESTSGDalso provides an estimated group fairness score based on sampling the input space to measure the degree of the identified subtle group discrimination, which is guaranteed to be accurate up to an error bound. We evaluate TESTSGDon multiple neural network models trained on popular datasets including both structured data and text data. The experiment results show that TESTSGDis effective and efficient in identifying and measuring such subtle group discrimination that has never been revealed before. Furthermore, we show that the testing results of TESTSGDcan guide generation of new samples to mitigate such discrimination through retraining with negligible accuracy drop.

Mask and Reason: Pre-Training Knowledge Graph Transformers for Complex Logical Queries

Knowledge graph (KG) embeddings have been a mainstream approach for reasoning over incomplete KGs. However, limited by their inherently shallow and static architectures, they can hardly deal with the rising focus on complex logical queries, which comprise logical operators, imputed edges, multiple source entities, and unknown intermediate entities. In this work, we present the Knowledge Graph Transformer (kgTransformer) with masked pre-training and fine-tuning strategies. We design a KG triple transformation method to enable Transformer to handle KGs, which is further strengthened by the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) sparse activation. We then formulate the complex logical queries as masked prediction and introduce a two-stage masked pre-training strategy to improve transferability and generalizability. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that kgTransformer can consistently outperform both KG embedding-based baselines and advanced encoders on nine in-domain and out-of-domain reasoning tasks. Additionally, kgTransformer can reason with explainability via providing the full reasoning paths to interpret given answers.

Long Short-Term Preference Modeling for Continuous-Time Sequential Recommendation

Modeling the evolution of user preference is essential in recommender systems. Recently, dynamic graph-based methods have been studied and achieved SOTA for recommendation, majority of which focus on user's stable long-term preference. However, in real-world scenario, user's short-term preference evolves over time dynamically. Although there exists sequential methods that attempt to capture it, how to model the evolution of short-term preference with dynamic graph-based methods has not been well-addressed yet. In particular: 1) existing methods do not explicitly encode and capture the evolution of short-term preference as sequential methods do; 2) simply using last few interactions is not enough for modeling the changing trend. In this paper, we propose Long Short-Term Preference Modeling for Continuous-Time Sequential Recommendation (LSTSR) to capture the evolution of short-term preference under dynamic graph. Specifically, we explicitly encode short-term preference and optimize it via memory mechanism, which has three key operations: Message, Aggregate and Update. Our memory mechanism can not only store one-hop information, but also trigger with new interactions online. Extensive experiments conducted on five public datasets show that LSTSR consistently outperforms many state-of-the-art recommendation methods across various lines.