Modeling Dyadic Conversations for Personality Inference

Nowadays, automatical personality inference is drawing extensive attention from both academia and industry. Conventional methods are mainly based on user generated contents, e.g., profiles, likes, and texts of an individual, on social media, which are actually not very reliable. In contrast, dyadic conversations between individuals can not only capture how one expresses oneself, but also reflect how one reacts to different situations. Rich contextual information in dyadic conversation can explain an individual's response during his or her conversation. In this paper, we propose a novel augmented Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) model for learning unsupervised Personal Conversational Embeddings (PCE) based on dyadic conversations between individuals. We adjust the formulation of each layer of a conventional GRU with sequence to sequence learning and personal information of both sides of the conversation. Based on the learned PCE, we can infer the personality of each individual. We conduct experiments on the Movie Script dataset, which is collected from conversations between characters in movie scripts. We find that modeling dyadic conversations between individuals can significantly improve personality inference accuracy. Experimental results illustrate the successful performance of our proposed method.

DNN2LR: Interpretation-inspired Feature Crossing for Real-world Tabular Data

For sake of reliability, it is necessary for models in real-world applications to be both powerful and globally interpretable. Simple linear classifiers, e.g., Logistic Regression (LR), are globally interpretable, but not powerful enough to model complex nonlinear interactions among features in tabular data. Meanwhile, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown great effectiveness for modeling tabular data, but is not globally interpretable. Accordingly, it will be promising if we can propose a feature crossing method to find feature interactions in DNN, and use them as cross features in LR. The local piece-wise interpretations in DNN of a specific feature are usually inconsistent in different samples, which is caused by feature interactions in the hidden layers. Inspired by this, we give definition of the interpretation inconsistency in DNN, and accordingly propose a novel feature crossing method called DNN2LR. Extensive experiments have been conducted on five public datasets and two real-world datasets. The final model, a LR model empowered with cross features, generated by DNN2LR can outperform the complex DNN model, as well as several state-of-the-art feature crossing methods. The experimental results strongly verify the effectiveness and efficiency of DNN2LR, especially on real-world datasets with large numbers of feature fields.

Deep Active Learning by Model Interpretability

Recent successes of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in a variety of research tasks, however, heavily rely on the large amounts of labeled samples. This may require considerable annotation cost in real-world applications. Fortunately, active learning is a promising methodology to train high-performing model with minimal annotation cost. In the deep learning context, the critical question of active learning is how to precisely identify the informativeness of samples for DNN. In this paper, inspired by piece-wise linear interpretability in DNN, we firstly introduce the linear separable regions of samples to the problem of active learning, and propose a novel Deep Active learning approach by Model Interpretability (DAMI). To keep the maximal representativeness of the entire unlabeled data, DAMI tries to select and label samples on different linear separable regions introduced by the piece-wise linear interpretability in DNN. We focus on two scenarios: 1) Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) for modeling tabular data; 2) language models for modeling textual data. On tabular data, we use the local piece-wise interpretation in DNN as the representation of each sample, and directly run K-Center clustering to select and label the central sample in each cluster. On textual data, we propose a novel aggregator to find the most informative word in each sentence, and use its local piece-wise interpretation as the representation of the sentence. To be noted, this whole process of DAMI does not require any hyper-parameters to tune manually. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, extensive experiments have been conducted on both tabular datasets and textual datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that DAMI constantly outperforms several state-of-the-art compared methods.

DeepSlicing: Deep Reinforcement Learning Assisted Resource Allocation for Network Slicing

Network slicing enables multiple virtual networks run on the same physical infrastructure to support various use cases in 5G and beyond. These use cases, however, have very diverse network resource demands, e.g., communication and computation, and various performance metrics such as latency and throughput. To effectively allocate network resources to slices, we propose DeepSlicing that integrates the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL). DeepSlicing decomposes the network slicing problem into a master problem and several slave problems. The master problem is solved based on convex optimization and the slave problem is handled by DRL method which learns the optimal resource allocation policy. The performance of the proposed algorithm is validated through network simulations.

Simplification of Graph Convolutional Networks: A Matrix Factorization-based Perspective

In recent years, substantial progress has been made on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). However, the computing of GCN usually requires a large memory space for keeping the entire graph. In consequence, GCN is not flexible enough, especially for large scale graphs in complex real-world applications. Fortunately, methods based on Matrix Factorization (MF) naturally support constructing mini-batches, and thus are more friendly to distributed computing compared with GCN. Accordingly, in this paper, we analyze the connections between GCN and MF, and simplify GCN as matrix factorization with unitization and co-training. Furthermore, under the guidance of our analysis, we propose an alternative model to GCN named Unitized and Co-training Matrix Factorization (UCMF). Extensive experiments have been conducted on several real-world datasets. On the task of semi-supervised node classification, the experimental results illustrate that UCMF achieves similar or superior performances compared with GCN. Meanwhile, distributed UCMF significantly outperforms distributed GCN methods, which shows that UCMF can greatly benefit large scale and complex real-world applications. Moreover, we have also conducted experiments on a typical task of graph embedding, i.e., community detection, and the proposed UCMF model outperforms several representative graph embedding models.

Accountable Off-Policy Evaluation With Kernel Bellman Statistics

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE), which evaluates the performance of a new policy from observed data collected from previous experiments, without requiring the execution of the new policy. This finds important applications in areas with high execution cost or safety concerns, such as medical diagnosis, recommendation systems and robotics. In practice, due to the limited information from off-policy data, it is highly desirable to construct rigorous confidence intervals, not just point estimation, for the policy performance. In this work, we propose a new variational framework which reduces the problem of calculating tight confidence bounds in OPE into an optimization problem on a feasible set that catches the true state-action value function with high probability. The feasible set is constructed by leveraging statistical properties of a recently proposed kernel Bellman loss (Feng et al., 2019). We design an efficient computational approach for calculating our bounds, and extend it to perform post-hoc diagnosis and correction for existing estimators. Empirical results show that our method yields tight confidence intervals in different settings.