Confidence-aware Fine-tuning of Sequential Recommendation Systems via Conformal Prediction

In Sequential Recommendation Systems, Cross-Entropy (CE) loss is commonly used but fails to harness item confidence scores during training. Recognizing the critical role of confidence in aligning training objectives with evaluation metrics, we propose CPFT, a versatile framework that enhances recommendation confidence by integrating Conformal Prediction (CP)-based losses with CE loss during fine-tuning. CPFT dynamically generates a set of items with a high probability of containing the ground truth, enriching the training process by incorporating validation data without compromising its role in model selection. This innovative approach, coupled with CP-based losses, sharpens the focus on refining recommendation sets, thereby elevating the confidence in potential item predictions. By fine-tuning item confidence through CP-based losses, CPFT significantly enhances model performance, leading to more precise and trustworthy recommendations that increase user trust and satisfaction. Our extensive evaluation across five diverse datasets and four distinct sequential models confirms CPFT's substantial impact on improving recommendation quality through strategic confidence optimization. Access to the framework's code will be provided following the acceptance of the paper.

Beyond Detection: Unveiling Fairness Vulnerabilities in Abusive Language Models

This work investigates the potential of undermining both fairness and detection performance in abusive language detection. In a dynamic and complex digital world, it is crucial to investigate the vulnerabilities of these detection models to adversarial fairness attacks to improve their fairness robustness. We propose a simple yet effective framework FABLE that leverages backdoor attacks as they allow targeted control over the fairness and detection performance. FABLE explores three types of trigger designs (i.e., rare, artificial, and natural triggers) and novel sampling strategies. Specifically, the adversary can inject triggers into samples in the minority group with the favored outcome (i.e., "non-abusive") and flip their labels to the unfavored outcome, i.e., "abusive". Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of FABLE attacking fairness and utility in abusive language detection.

Collaborative Contextualization: Bridging the Gap between Collaborative Filtering and Pre-trained Language Model

Traditional recommender systems have heavily relied on identity representations (IDs) to model users and items, while the ascendancy of pre-trained language model (PLM) encoders has enriched the modeling of contextual item descriptions. However, PLMs, although effective in addressing few-shot, zero-shot, or unified modeling scenarios, often neglect the crucial collaborative filtering signal. This neglect gives rise to two pressing challenges: (1) Collaborative Contextualization, the seamless integration of collaborative signals with contextual representations. (2) the imperative to bridge the representation gap between ID-based representations and contextual representations while preserving their contextual semantics. In this paper, we propose CollabContext, a novel model that adeptly combines collaborative filtering signals with contextual representations and aligns these representations within the contextual space, preserving essential contextual semantics. Experimental results across three real-world datasets demonstrate substantial improvements. Leveraging collaborative contextualization, CollabContext can also be effectively applied to cold-start scenarios, achieving remarkable enhancements in recommendation performance. The code is available after the conference accepts the paper.

On Fair Classification with Mostly Private Sensitive Attributes

Machine learning models have demonstrated promising performance in many areas. However, the concerns that they can be biased against specific groups hinder their adoption in high-stake applications. Thus it is essential to ensure fairness in machine learning models. Most of the previous efforts require access to sensitive attributes for mitigating bias. Nonetheless, it is often infeasible to obtain large scale of data with sensitive attributes due to people's increasing awareness of privacy and the legal compliance. Therefore, an important research question is how to make fair predictions under privacy? In this paper, we study a novel problem on fair classification in a semi-private setting, where most of the sensitive attributes are private and only a small amount of clean sensitive attributes are available. To this end, we propose a novel framework FairSP that can first learn to correct the noisy sensitive attributes under privacy guarantee via exploiting the limited clean sensitive attributes. Then, it jointly models the corrected and clean data in an adversarial way for debiasing and prediction. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed model can ensure fairness when most of the sensitive attributes are private. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for making fair predictions under privacy and maintaining high accuracy.

Joint Adversarial Learning for Cross-domain Fair Classification

Modern machine learning (ML) models are becoming increasingly popular and are widely used in decision-making systems. However, studies have shown critical issues of ML discrimination and unfairness, which hinder their adoption on high-stake applications. Recent research on fair classifiers has drawn significant attention to develop effective algorithms to achieve fairness and good classification performance. Despite the great success of these fairness-aware machine learning models, most of the existing models require sensitive attributes to preprocess the data, regularize the model learning or postprocess the prediction to have fair predictions. However, sensitive attributes are often incomplete or even unavailable due to privacy, legal or regulation restrictions. Though we lack the sensitive attribute for training a fair model in the target domain, there might exist a similar domain that has sensitive attributes. Thus, it is important to exploit auxiliary information from the similar domain to help improve fair classification in the target domain. Therefore, in this paper, we study a novel problem of exploring domain adaptation for fair classification. We propose a new framework that can simultaneously estimate the sensitive attributes while learning a fair classifier in the target domain. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for fair classification, even when no sensitive attributes are available in the target domain.

Pre-training Graph Neural Network for Cross Domain Recommendation

A recommender system predicts users' potential interests in items, where the core is to learn user/item embeddings. Nevertheless, it suffers from the data-sparsity issue, which the cross-domain recommendation can alleviate. However, most prior works either jointly learn the source domain and target domain models, or require side-features. However, jointly training and side features would affect the prediction on the target domain as the learned embedding is dominated by the source domain containing bias information. Inspired by the contemporary arts in pre-training from graph representation learning, we propose a pre-training and fine-tuning diagram for cross-domain recommendation. We devise a novel Pre-training Graph Neural Network for Cross-Domain Recommendation (PCRec), which adopts the contrastive self-supervised pre-training of a graph encoder. Then, we transfer the pre-trained graph encoder to initialize the node embeddings on the target domain, which benefits the fine-tuning of the single domain recommender system on the target domain. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of PCRec. Detailed analyses verify the superiority of PCRec in transferring information while avoiding biases from source domains.