RecMind: Large Language Model Powered Agent For Recommendation

Recent advancements in instructing Large Language Models (LLMs) to utilize external tools and execute multi-step plans have significantly enhanced their ability to solve intricate tasks, ranging from mathematical problems to creative writing. Yet, there remains a notable gap in studying the capacity of LLMs in responding to personalized queries such as a recommendation request. To bridge this gap, we have designed an LLM-powered autonomous recommender agent, RecMind, which is capable of providing precise personalized recommendations through careful planning, utilizing tools for obtaining external knowledge, and leveraging individual data. We propose a novel algorithm, Self-Inspiring, to improve the planning ability of the LLM agent. At each intermediate planning step, the LLM 'self-inspires' to consider all previously explored states to plan for next step. This mechanism greatly improves the model's ability to comprehend and utilize historical planning information for recommendation. We evaluate RecMind's performance in various recommendation scenarios, including rating prediction, sequential recommendation, direct recommendation, explanation generation, and review summarization. Our experiment shows that RecMind outperforms existing zero/few-shot LLM-based recommendation methods in different recommendation tasks and achieves competitive performance to a recent model P5, which requires fully pre-train for the recommendation tasks.

Multi-Task Knowledge Enhancement for Zero-Shot and Multi-Domain Recommendation in an AI Assistant Application

Recommender systems have found significant commercial success but still struggle with integrating new users. Since users often interact with content in different domains, it is possible to leverage a user's interactions in previous domains to improve that user's recommendations in a new one (multi-domain recommendation). A separate research thread on knowledge graph enhancement uses external knowledge graphs to improve single domain recommendations (knowledge graph enhancement). Both research threads incorporate related information to improve predictions in a new domain. We propose in this work to unify these approaches: Using information from interactions in other domains as well as external knowledge graphs to make predictions in a new domain that would be impossible with either information source alone. We apply these ideas to a dataset derived from millions of users' requests for content across three domains (videos, music, and books) in a live virtual assistant application. We demonstrate the advantage of combining knowledge graph enhancement with previous multi-domain recommendation techniques to provide better overall recommendations as well as for better recommendations on new users of a domain.

KG-ECO: Knowledge Graph Enhanced Entity Correction for Query Rewriting

Query Rewriting (QR) plays a critical role in large-scale dialogue systems for reducing frictions. When there is an entity error, it imposes extra challenges for a dialogue system to produce satisfactory responses. In this work, we propose KG-ECO: Knowledge Graph enhanced Entity COrrection for query rewriting, an entity correction system with corrupt entity span detection and entity retrieval/re-ranking functionalities. To boost the model performance, we incorporate Knowledge Graph (KG) to provide entity structural information (neighboring entities encoded by graph neural networks) and textual information (KG entity descriptions encoded by RoBERTa). Experimental results show that our approach yields a clear performance gain over two baselines: utterance level QR and entity correction without utilizing KG information. The proposed system is particularly effective for few-shot learning cases where target entities are rarely seen in training or there is a KG relation between the target entity and other contextual entities in the query.

Robust Regularized Low-Rank Matrix Models for Regression and Classification

While matrix variate regression models have been studied in many existing works, classical statistical and computational methods for the analysis of the regression coefficient estimation are highly affected by high dimensional and noisy matrix-valued predictors. To address these issues, this paper proposes a framework of matrix variate regression models based on a rank constraint, vector regularization (e.g., sparsity), and a general loss function with three special cases considered: ordinary matrix regression, robust matrix regression, and matrix logistic regression. We also propose an alternating projected gradient descent algorithm. Based on analyzing our objective functions on manifolds with bounded curvature, we show that the algorithm is guaranteed to converge, all accumulation points of the iterates have estimation errors in the order of $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ asymptotically and substantially attaining the minimax rate. Our theoretical analysis can be applied to general optimization problems on manifolds with bounded curvature and can be considered an important technical contribution to this work. We validate the proposed method through simulation studies and real image data examples.

Learning to Selectively Learn for Weakly-supervised Paraphrase Generation

Paraphrase generation is a longstanding NLP task that has diverse applications for downstream NLP tasks. However, the effectiveness of existing efforts predominantly relies on large amounts of golden labeled data. Though unsupervised endeavors have been proposed to address this issue, they may fail to generate meaningful paraphrases due to the lack of supervision signals. In this work, we go beyond the existing paradigms and propose a novel approach to generate high-quality paraphrases with weak supervision data. Specifically, we tackle the weakly-supervised paraphrase generation problem by: (1) obtaining abundant weakly-labeled parallel sentences via retrieval-based pseudo paraphrase expansion; and (2) developing a meta-learning framework to progressively select valuable samples for fine-tuning a pre-trained language model, i.e., BART, on the sentential paraphrasing task. We demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements over existing unsupervised approaches, and is even comparable in performance with supervised state-of-the-arts.

ALMA: Alternating Minimization Algorithm for Clustering Mixture Multilayer Network

The paper considers a Mixture Multilayer Stochastic Block Model (MMLSBM), where layers can be partitioned into groups of similar networks, and networks in each group are equipped with a distinct Stochastic Block Model. The goal is to partition the multilayer network into clusters of similar layers, and to identify communities in those layers. Jing et al. (2020) introduced the MMLSBM and developed a clustering methodology, TWIST, based on regularized tensor decomposition. The present paper proposes a different technique, an alternating minimization algorithm (ALMA), that aims at simultaneous recovery of the layer partition, together with estimation of the matrices of connection probabilities of the distinct layers. Compared to TWIST, ALMA achieves higher accuracy both theoretically and numerically.

Pattern-aware Data Augmentation for Query Rewriting in Voice Assistant Systems

Query rewriting (QR) systems are widely used to reduce the friction caused by errors in a spoken language understanding pipeline. However, the underlying supervised models require a large number of labeled pairs, and these pairs are hard and costly to be collected. Therefore, We propose an augmentation framework that learns patterns from existing training pairs and generates rewrite candidates from rewrite labels inversely to compensate for insufficient QR training data. The proposed framework casts the augmentation problem as a sequence-to-sequence generation task and enforces the optimization process with a policy gradient technique for controllable rewarding. This approach goes beyond the traditional heuristics or rule-based augmentation methods and is not constrained to generate predefined patterns of swapping/replacing words. Our experimental results show its effectiveness compared with a fully trained QR baseline and demonstrate its potential application in boosting the QR performance on low-resource domains or locales.