Explaining Time Series via Contrastive and Locally Sparse Perturbations

Explaining multivariate time series is a compound challenge, as it requires identifying important locations in the time series and matching complex temporal patterns. Although previous saliency-based methods addressed the challenges, their perturbation may not alleviate the distribution shift issue, which is inevitable especially in heterogeneous samples. We present ContraLSP, a locally sparse model that introduces counterfactual samples to build uninformative perturbations but keeps distribution using contrastive learning. Furthermore, we incorporate sample-specific sparse gates to generate more binary-skewed and smooth masks, which easily integrate temporal trends and select the salient features parsimoniously. Empirical studies on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that ContraLSP outperforms state-of-the-art models, demonstrating a substantial improvement in explanation quality for time series data. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/zichuan-liu/ContraLSP}.

RCAgent: Cloud Root Cause Analysis by Autonomous Agents with Tool-Augmented Large Language Models

Large language model (LLM) applications in cloud root cause analysis (RCA) have been actively explored recently. However, current methods are still reliant on manual workflow settings and do not unleash LLMs' decision-making and environment interaction capabilities. We present RCAgent, a tool-augmented LLM autonomous agent framework for practical and privacy-aware industrial RCA usage. Running on an internally deployed model rather than GPT families, RCAgent is capable of free-form data collection and comprehensive analysis with tools. Our framework combines a variety of enhancements, including a unique Self-Consistency for action trajectories, and a suite of methods for context management, stabilization, and importing domain knowledge. Our experiments show RCAgent's evident and consistent superiority over ReAct across all aspects of RCA -- predicting root causes, solutions, evidence, and responsibilities -- and tasks covered or uncovered by current rules, as validated by both automated metrics and human evaluations. Furthermore, RCAgent has already been integrated into the diagnosis and issue discovery workflow of the Real-time Compute Platform for Apache Flink of Alibaba Cloud.

Multi-factor Sequential Re-ranking with Perception-Aware Diversification

Feed recommendation systems, which recommend a sequence of items for users to browse and interact with, have gained significant popularity in practical applications. In feed products, users tend to browse a large number of items in succession, so the previously viewed items have a significant impact on users' behavior towards the following items. Therefore, traditional methods that mainly focus on improving the accuracy of recommended items are suboptimal for feed recommendations because they may recommend highly similar items. For feed recommendation, it is crucial to consider both the accuracy and diversity of the recommended item sequences in order to satisfy users' evolving interest when consecutively viewing items. To this end, this work proposes a general re-ranking framework named Multi-factor Sequential Re-ranking with Perception-Aware Diversification (MPAD) to jointly optimize accuracy and diversity for feed recommendation in a sequential manner. Specifically, MPAD first extracts users' different scales of interests from their behavior sequences through graph clustering-based aggregations. Then, MPAD proposes two sub-models to respectively evaluate the accuracy and diversity of a given item by capturing users' evolving interest due to the ever-changing context and users' personal perception of diversity from an item sequence perspective. This is consistent with the browsing nature of the feed scenario. Finally, MPAD generates the return list by sequentially selecting optimal items from the candidate set to maximize the joint benefits of accuracy and diversity of the entire list. MPAD has been implemented in Taobao's homepage feed to serve the main traffic and provide services to recommend billions of items to hundreds of millions of users every day.

GPatch: Patching Graph Neural Networks for Cold-Start Recommendations

Cold start is an essential and persistent problem in recommender systems. State-of-the-art solutions rely on training hybrid models for both cold-start and existing users/items, based on the auxiliary information. Such a hybrid model would compromise the performance of existing users/items, which might make these solutions not applicable in real-worlds recommender systems where the experience of existing users/items must be guaranteed. Meanwhile, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been demonstrated to perform effectively warm (non-cold-start) recommendations. However, they have never been applied to handle the cold-start problem in a user-item bipartite graph. This is a challenging but rewarding task since cold-start users/items do not have links. Besides, it is nontrivial to design an appropriate GNN to conduct cold-start recommendations while maintaining the performance for existing users/items. To bridge the gap, we propose a tailored GNN-based framework (GPatch) that contains two separate but correlated components. First, an efficient GNN architecture -- GWarmer, is designed to model the warm users/items. Second, we construct correlated Patching Networks to simulate and patch GWarmer by conducting cold-start recommendations. Experiments on benchmark and large-scale commercial datasets demonstrate that GPatch is significantly superior in providing recommendations for both existing and cold-start users/items.