Ad Recommendation in a Collapsed and Entangled World

In this paper, we present an industry ad recommendation system, paying attention to the challenges and practices of learning appropriate representations. Our study begins by showcasing our approaches to preserving priors when encoding features of diverse types into embedding representations. Specifically, we address sequence features, numeric features, pre-trained embedding features, as well as sparse ID features. Moreover, we delve into two pivotal challenges associated with feature representation: the dimensional collapse of embeddings and the interest entanglement across various tasks or scenarios. Subsequently, we propose several practical approaches to effectively tackle these two challenges. We then explore several training techniques to facilitate model optimization, reduce bias, and enhance exploration. Furthermore, we introduce three analysis tools that enable us to comprehensively study feature correlation, dimensional collapse, and interest entanglement. This work builds upon the continuous efforts of Tencent's ads recommendation team in the last decade. It not only summarizes general design principles but also presents a series of off-the-shelf solutions and analysis tools. The reported performance is based on our online advertising platform, which handles hundreds of billions of requests daily, serving millions of ads to billions of users.

The Butterfly Effect of Model Editing: Few Edits Can Trigger Large Language Models Collapse

Although model editing has shown promise in revising knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs), its impact on the inherent capabilities of LLMs is often overlooked. In this work, we reveal a critical phenomenon: even a single edit can trigger model collapse, manifesting as significant performance degradation in various benchmark tasks. However, benchmarking LLMs after each edit, while necessary to prevent such collapses, is impractically time-consuming and resource-intensive. To mitigate this, we propose using perplexity as a surrogate metric, validated by extensive experiments demonstrating its strong correlation with downstream tasks performance. We further conduct an in-depth study on sequential editing, a practical setting for real-world scenarios, across various editing methods and LLMs, focusing on hard cases from our previous single edit studies. The results indicate that nearly all examined editing methods result in model collapse after only few edits. To facilitate further research, we have utilized GPT-3.5 to develop a new dataset, HardEdit, based on those hard cases. This dataset aims to establish the foundation for pioneering research in reliable model editing and the mechanisms underlying editing-induced model collapse. We hope this work can draw the community's attention to the potential risks inherent in model editing practices.

GPNet: Simplifying Graph Neural Networks via Multi-channel Geometric Polynomials

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a promising deep learning approach for circumventing many real-world problems on graph-structured data. However, these models usually have at least one of four fundamental limitations: over-smoothing, over-fitting, difficult to train, and strong homophily assumption. For example, Simple Graph Convolution (SGC) is known to suffer from the first and fourth limitations. To tackle these limitations, we identify a set of key designs including (D1) dilated convolution, (D2) multi-channel learning, (D3) self-attention score, and (D4) sign factor to boost learning from different types (i.e. homophily and heterophily) and scales (i.e. small, medium, and large) of networks, and combine them into a graph neural network, GPNet, a simple and efficient one-layer model. We theoretically analyze the model and show that it can approximate various graph filters by adjusting the self-attention score and sign factor. Experiments show that GPNet consistently outperforms baselines in terms of average rank, average accuracy, complexity, and parameters on semi-supervised and full-supervised tasks, and achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art model with inductive learning task.

A trained humanoid robot can perform human-like crossmodal social attention conflict resolution

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, robots could be seen as potential resources in tasks like helping people work remotely, sustaining social distancing, and improving mental or physical health. To enhance human-robot interaction, it is essential for robots to become more socialised, via processing multiple social cues in a complex real-world environment. Our study adopted a neurorobotic paradigm of gaze-triggered audio-visual crossmodal integration to make an iCub robot express human-like social attention responses. At first, a behavioural experiment was conducted on 37 human participants. To improve ecological validity, a round-table meeting scenario with three masked animated avatars was designed with the middle one capable of performing gaze shift, and the other two capable of generating sound. The gaze direction and the sound location are either congruent or incongruent. Masks were used to cover all facial visual cues other than the avatars' eyes. We observed that the avatar's gaze could trigger crossmodal social attention with better human performance in the audio-visual congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. Then, our computational model, GASP, was trained to implement social cue detection, audio-visual saliency prediction, and selective attention. After finishing the model training, the iCub robot was exposed to similar laboratory conditions as human participants, demonstrating that it can replicate similar attention responses as humans regarding the congruency and incongruency performance, while overall the human performance was still superior. Therefore, this interdisciplinary work provides new insights on mechanisms of crossmodal social attention and how it can be modelled in robots in a complex environment.

How Can AI Recognize Pain and Express Empathy

Sensory and emotional experiences such as pain and empathy are relevant to mental and physical health. The current drive for automated pain recognition is motivated by a growing number of healthcare requirements and demands for social interaction make it increasingly essential. Despite being a trending area, they have not been explored in great detail. Over the past decades, behavioral science and neuroscience have uncovered mechanisms that explain the manifestations of pain. Recently, also artificial intelligence research has allowed empathic machine learning methods to be approachable. Generally, the purpose of this paper is to review the current developments for computational pain recognition and artificial empathy implementation. Our discussion covers the following topics: How can AI recognize pain from unimodality and multimodality? Is it necessary for AI to be empathic? How can we create an AI agent with proactive and reactive empathy? This article explores the challenges and opportunities of real-world multimodal pain recognition from a psychological, neuroscientific, and artificial intelligence perspective. Finally, we identify possible future implementations of artificial empathy and analyze how humans might benefit from an AI agent equipped with empathy.

Apache Submarine: A Unified Machine Learning Platform Made Simple

As machine learning is applied more widely, it is necessary to have a machine learning platform for both infrastructure administrators and users including expert data scientists and citizen data scientists to improve their productivity. However, existing machine learning platforms are ill-equipped to address the "Machine Learning tech debts" such as glue code, reproducibility, and portability. Furthermore, existing platforms only take expert data scientists into consideration, and thus they are inflexible for infrastructure administrators and non-user-friendly for citizen data scientists. We propose Submarine, a unified machine learning platform, to address the challenges.

What can computational models learn from human selective attention? A review from an audiovisual crossmodal perspective

Selective attention plays an essential role in information acquisition and utilization from the environment. In the past 50 years, research on selective attention has been a central topic in cognitive science. Compared with unimodal studies, crossmodal studies are more complex but necessary to solve real-world challenges in both human experiments and computational modeling. Although an increasing number of findings on crossmodal selective attention have shed light on humans' behavioral patterns and neural underpinnings, a much better understanding is still necessary to yield the same benefit for computational intelligent agents. This article reviews studies of selective attention in unimodal visual and auditory and crossmodal audiovisual setups from the multidisciplinary perspectives of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and evaluates different ways to simulate analogous mechanisms in computational models and robotics. We discuss the gaps between these fields in this interdisciplinary review and provide insights about how to use psychological findings and theories in artificial intelligence from different perspectives.

Hybrid Low-order and Higher-order Graph Convolutional Networks

With higher-order neighborhood information of graph network, the accuracy of graph representation learning classification can be significantly improved. However, the current higher order graph convolutional network has a large number of parameters and high computational complexity. Therefore, we propose a Hybrid Lower order and Higher order Graph convolutional networks (HLHG) learning model, which uses weight sharing mechanism to reduce the number of network parameters. To reduce computational complexity, we propose a novel fusion pooling layer to combine the neighborhood information of high order and low order. Theoretically, we compare the model complexity of the proposed model with the other state-of-the-art model. Experimentally, we verify the proposed model on the large-scale text network datasets by supervised learning, and on the citation network datasets by semi-supervised learning. The experimental results show that the proposed model achieves highest classification accuracy with a small set of trainable weight parameters.

Assessing the Contribution of Semantic Congruency to Multisensory Integration and Conflict Resolution

The efficient integration of multisensory observations is a key property of the brain that yields the robust interaction with the environment. However, artificial multisensory perception remains an open issue especially in situations of sensory uncertainty and conflicts. In this work, we extend previous studies on audio-visual (AV) conflict resolution in complex environments. In particular, we focus on quantitatively assessing the contribution of semantic congruency during an AV spatial localization task. In addition to conflicts in the spatial domain (i.e. spatially misaligned stimuli), we consider gender-specific conflicts with male and female avatars. Our results suggest that while semantically related stimuli affect the magnitude of the visual bias (perceptually shifting the location of the sound towards a semantically congruent visual cue), humans still strongly rely on environmental statistics to solve AV conflicts. Together with previously reported results, this work contributes to a better understanding of how multisensory integration and conflict resolution can be modelled in artificial agents and robots operating in real-world environments.