Improving One-class Recommendation with Multi-tasking on Various Preference Intensities

In the one-class recommendation problem, it's required to make recommendations basing on users' implicit feedback, which is inferred from their action and inaction. Existing works obtain representations of users and items by encoding positive and negative interactions observed from training data. However, these efforts assume that all positive signals from implicit feedback reflect a fixed preference intensity, which is not realistic. Consequently, representations learned with these methods usually fail to capture informative entity features that reflect various preference intensities. In this paper, we propose a multi-tasking framework taking various preference intensities of each signal from implicit feedback into consideration. Representations of entities are required to satisfy the objective of each subtask simultaneously, making them more robust and generalizable. Furthermore, we incorporate attentive graph convolutional layers to explore high-order relationships in the user-item bipartite graph and dynamically capture the latent tendencies of users toward the items they interact with. Experimental results show that our method performs better than state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on three large-scale real-world benchmark datasets.

Learning Unsupervised Semantic Document Representation for Fine-grained Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Document representation is the core of many NLP tasks on machine understanding. A general representation learned in an unsupervised manner reserves generality and can be used for various applications. In practice, sentiment analysis (SA) has been a challenging task that is regarded to be deeply semantic-related and is often used to assess general representations. Existing methods on unsupervised document representation learning can be separated into two families: sequential ones, which explicitly take the ordering of words into consideration, and non-sequential ones, which do not explicitly do so. However, both of them suffer from their own weaknesses. In this paper, we propose a model that overcomes difficulties encountered by both families of methods. Experiments show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on popular SA datasets and a fine-grained aspect-based SA by a large margin.

Addressing Long-Horizon Tasks by Integrating Program Synthesis and State Machines

Deep reinforcement learning excels in various domains but lacks generalizability and interoperability. Programmatic RL methods (Trivedi et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2023) reformulate solving RL tasks as synthesizing interpretable programs that can be executed in the environments. Despite encouraging results, these methods are limited to short-horizon tasks. On the other hand, representing RL policies using state machines (Inala et al., 2020) can inductively generalize to long-horizon tasks; however, it struggles to scale up to acquire diverse and complex behaviors. This work proposes Program Machine Policies (POMPs), which bridge the advantages of programmatic RL and state machine policies, allowing for the representation of complex behaviors and the address of long-term tasks. Specifically, we introduce a method that can retrieve a set of effective, diverse, compatible programs. Then, we use these programs as modes of a state machine and learn a transition function to transition among mode programs, allowing for capturing long-horizon repetitive behaviors. Our proposed framework outperforms programmatic RL and deep RL baselines on various tasks and demonstrates the ability to generalize to even longer horizons without any fine-tuning inductively. Ablation studies justify the effectiveness of our proposed search algorithm for retrieving a set of programs as modes.

printf: Preference Modeling Based on User Reviews with Item Images and Textual Information via Graph Learning

Nowadays, modern recommender systems usually leverage textual and visual contents as auxiliary information to predict user preference. For textual information, review texts are one of the most popular contents to model user behaviors. Nevertheless, reviews usually lose their shine when it comes to top-N recommender systems because those that solely utilize textual reviews as features struggle to adequately capture the interaction relationships between users and items. For visual one, it is usually modeled with naive convolutional networks and also hard to capture high-order relationships between users and items. Moreover, previous works did not collaboratively use both texts and images in a proper way. In this paper, we propose printf, preference modeling based on user reviews with item images and textual information via graph learning, to address the above challenges. Specifically, the dimension-based attention mechanism directs relations between user reviews and interacted items, allowing each dimension to contribute different importance weights to derive user representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on three publicly available datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed printf consistently outperforms baseline methods with the relative improvements for NDCG@5 of 26.80%, 48.65%, and 25.74% on Amazon-Grocery, Amazon-Tools, and Amazon-Electronics datasets, respectively. The in-depth analysis also indicates the dimensions of review representations definitely have different topics and aspects, assisting the validity of our model design.

Attentive Graph-based Text-aware Preference Modeling for Top-N Recommendation

Textual data are commonly used as auxiliary information for modeling user preference nowadays. While many prior works utilize user reviews for rating prediction, few focus on top-N recommendation, and even few try to incorporate item textual contents such as title and description. Though delivering promising performance for rating prediction, we empirically find that many review-based models cannot perform comparably well on top-N recommendation. Also, user reviews are not available in some recommendation scenarios, while item textual contents are more prevalent. On the other hand, recent graph convolutional network (GCN) based models demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for top-N recommendation. Thus, in this work, we aim to further improve top-N recommendation by effectively modeling both item textual content and high-order connectivity in user-item graph. We propose a new model named Attentive Graph-based Text-aware Recommendation Model (AGTM). Extensive experiments are provided to justify the rationality and effectiveness of our model design.

Hierarchical Programmatic Reinforcement Learning via Learning to Compose Programs

Aiming to produce reinforcement learning (RL) policies that are human-interpretable and can generalize better to novel scenarios, Trivedi et al. (2021) present a method (LEAPS) that first learns a program embedding space to continuously parameterize diverse programs from a pre-generated program dataset, and then searches for a task-solving program in the learned program embedding space when given a task. Despite encouraging results, the program policies that LEAPS can produce are limited by the distribution of the program dataset. Furthermore, during searching, LEAPS evaluates each candidate program solely based on its return, failing to precisely reward correct parts of programs and penalize incorrect parts. To address these issues, we propose to learn a meta-policy that composes a series of programs sampled from the learned program embedding space. By composing programs, our proposed method can produce program policies that describe out-of-distributionally complex behaviors and directly assign credits to programs that induce desired behaviors. We design and conduct extensive experiments in the Karel domain. The experimental results show that our proposed framework outperforms baselines. The ablation studies confirm the limitations of LEAPS and justify our design choices.

Mr. Right: Multimodal Retrieval on Representation of ImaGe witH Text

Multimodal learning is a recent challenge that extends unimodal learning by generalizing its domain to diverse modalities, such as texts, images, or speech. This extension requires models to process and relate information from multiple modalities. In Information Retrieval, traditional retrieval tasks focus on the similarity between unimodal documents and queries, while image-text retrieval hypothesizes that most texts contain the scene context from images. This separation has ignored that real-world queries may involve text content, image captions, or both. To address this, we introduce Multimodal Retrieval on Representation of ImaGe witH Text (Mr. Right), a novel and comprehensive dataset for multimodal retrieval. We utilize the Wikipedia dataset with rich text-image examples and generate three types of text-based queries with different modality information: text-related, image-related, and mixed. To validate the effectiveness of our dataset, we provide a multimodal training paradigm and evaluate previous text retrieval and image retrieval frameworks. The results show that proposed multimodal retrieval can improve retrieval performance, but creating a well-unified document representation with texts and images is still a challenge. We hope Mr. Right allows us to broaden current retrieval systems better and contributes to accelerating the advancement of multimodal learning in the Information Retrieval.

An Evaluation Dataset for Legal Word Embedding: A Case Study On Chinese Codex

Word embedding is a modern distributed word representations approach widely used in many natural language processing tasks. Converting the vocabulary in a legal document into a word embedding model facilitates subjecting legal documents to machine learning, deep learning, and other algorithms and subsequently performing the downstream tasks of natural language processing vis-\`a-vis, for instance, document classification, contract review, and machine translation. The most common and practical approach of accuracy evaluation with the word embedding model uses a benchmark set with linguistic rules or the relationship between words to perform analogy reasoning via algebraic calculation. This paper proposes establishing a 1,134 Legal Analogical Reasoning Questions Set (LARQS) from the 2,388 Chinese Codex corpus using five kinds of legal relations, which are then used to evaluate the accuracy of the Chinese word embedding model. Moreover, we discovered that legal relations might be ubiquitous in the word embedding model.

End-to-End Video Question-Answer Generation with Generator-Pretester Network

We study a novel task, Video Question-Answer Generation (VQAG), for challenging Video Question Answering (Video QA) task in multimedia. Due to expensive data annotation costs, many widely used, large-scale Video QA datasets such as Video-QA, MSVD-QA and MSRVTT-QA are automatically annotated using Caption Question Generation (CapQG) which inputs captions instead of the video itself. As captions neither fully represent a video, nor are they always practically available, it is crucial to generate question-answer pairs based on a video via Video Question-Answer Generation (VQAG). Existing video-to-text (V2T) approaches, despite taking a video as the input, only generate a question alone. In this work, we propose a novel model Generator-Pretester Network that focuses on two components: (1) The Joint Question-Answer Generator (JQAG) which generates a question with its corresponding answer to allow Video Question "Answering" training. (2) The Pretester (PT) verifies a generated question by trying to answer it and checks the pretested answer with both the model's proposed answer and the ground truth answer. We evaluate our system with the only two available large-scale human-annotated Video QA datasets and achieves state-of-the-art question generation performances. Furthermore, using our generated QA pairs only on the Video QA task, we can surpass some supervised baselines. We apply our generated questions to Video QA applications and surpasses some supervised baselines using generated questions only. As a pre-training strategy, we outperform both CapQG and transfer learning approaches when employing semi-supervised (20%) or fully supervised learning with annotated data. These experimental results suggest the novel perspectives for Video QA training.