ERASE: Benchmarking Feature Selection Methods for Deep Recommender Systems

Deep Recommender Systems (DRS) are increasingly dependent on a large number of feature fields for more precise recommendations. Effective feature selection methods are consequently becoming critical for further enhancing the accuracy and optimizing storage efficiencies to align with the deployment demands. This research area, particularly in the context of DRS, is nascent and faces three core challenges. Firstly, variant experimental setups across research papers often yield unfair comparisons, obscuring practical insights. Secondly, the existing literature's lack of detailed analysis on selection attributes, based on large-scale datasets and a thorough comparison among selection techniques and DRS backbones, restricts the generalizability of findings and impedes deployment on DRS. Lastly, research often focuses on comparing the peak performance achievable by feature selection methods, an approach that is typically computationally infeasible for identifying the optimal hyperparameters and overlooks evaluating the robustness and stability of these methods. To bridge these gaps, this paper presents ERASE, a comprehensive bEnchmaRk for feAture SElection for DRS. ERASE comprises a thorough evaluation of eleven feature selection methods, covering both traditional and deep learning approaches, across four public datasets, private industrial datasets, and a real-world commercial platform, achieving significant enhancement. Our code is available online for ease of reproduction.

Agent4Ranking: Semantic Robust Ranking via Personalized Query Rewriting Using Multi-agent LLM

Search engines are crucial as they provide an efficient and easy way to access vast amounts of information on the internet for diverse information needs. User queries, even with a specific need, can differ significantly. Prior research has explored the resilience of ranking models against typical query variations like paraphrasing, misspellings, and order changes. Yet, these works overlook how diverse demographics uniquely formulate identical queries. For instance, older individuals tend to construct queries more naturally and in varied order compared to other groups. This demographic diversity necessitates enhancing the adaptability of ranking models to diverse query formulations. To this end, in this paper, we propose a framework that integrates a novel rewriting pipeline that rewrites queries from various demographic perspectives and a novel framework to enhance ranking robustness. To be specific, we use Chain of Thought (CoT) technology to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents to emulate various demographic profiles, then use them for efficient query rewriting, and we innovate a robust Multi-gate Mixture of Experts (MMoE) architecture coupled with a hybrid loss function, collectively strengthening the ranking models' robustness. Our extensive experimentation on both public and industrial datasets assesses the efficacy of our query rewriting approach and the enhanced accuracy and robustness of the ranking model. The findings highlight the sophistication and effectiveness of our proposed model.

MILL: Mutual Verification with Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Query Expansion

Query expansion is a commonly-used technique in many search systems to better represent users' information needs with additional query terms. Existing studies for this task usually propose to expand a query with retrieved or generated contextual documents. However, both types of methods have clear limitations. For retrieval-based methods, the documents retrieved with the original query might not be accurate enough to reveal the search intent, especially when the query is brief or ambiguous. For generation-based methods, existing models can hardly be trained or aligned on a particular corpus, due to the lack of corpus-specific labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel Large Language Model (LLM) based mutual verification framework for query expansion, which alleviates the aforementioned limitations. Specifically, we first design a query-query-document generation pipeline, which can effectively leverage the contextual knowledge encoded in LLMs to generate sub-queries and corresponding documents from multiple perspectives. Next, we employ a mutual verification method for both generated and retrieved contextual documents, where 1) retrieved documents are filtered with the external contextual knowledge in generated documents, and 2) generated documents are filtered with the corpus-specific knowledge in retrieved documents. Overall, the proposed method allows retrieved and generated documents to complement each other to finalize a better query expansion. We conduct extensive experiments on three information retrieval datasets, i.e., TREC-DL-2020, TREC-COVID, and MSMARCO. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms other baselines significantly.

Fine-Grained Population Mobility Data-Based Community-Level COVID-19 Prediction Model

Predicting the number of infections in the anti-epidemic process is extremely beneficial to the government in developing anti-epidemic strategies, especially in fine-grained geographic units. Previous works focus on low spatial resolution prediction, e.g., county-level, and preprocess data to the same geographic level, which loses some useful information. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained population mobility data-based model (FGC-COVID) utilizing data of two geographic levels for community-level COVID-19 prediction. We use the population mobility data between Census Block Groups (CBGs), which is a finer-grained geographic level than community, to build the graph and capture the dependencies between CBGs using graph neural networks (GNNs). To mine as finer-grained patterns as possible for prediction, a spatial weighted aggregation module is introduced to aggregate the embeddings of CBGs to community level based on their geographic affiliation and spatial autocorrelation. Extensive experiments on 300 days LA city COVID-19 data indicate our model outperforms existing forecasting models on community-level COVID-19 prediction.