Chain-of-Layer: Iteratively Prompting Large Language Models for Taxonomy Induction from Limited Examples

Automatic taxonomy induction is crucial for web search, recommendation systems, and question answering. Manual curation of taxonomies is expensive in terms of human effort, making automatic taxonomy construction highly desirable. In this work, we introduce Chain-of-Layer which is an in-context learning framework designed to induct taxonomies from a given set of entities. Chain-of-Layer breaks down the task into selecting relevant candidate entities in each layer and gradually building the taxonomy from top to bottom. To minimize errors, we introduce the Ensemble-based Ranking Filter to reduce the hallucinated content generated at each iteration. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Chain-of-Layer achieves state-of-the-art performance on four real-world benchmarks.

A Survey on Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation

Cross-domain sequential recommendation (CDSR) shifts the modeling of user preferences from flat to stereoscopic by integrating and learning interaction information from multiple domains at different granularities (ranging from inter-sequence to intra-sequence and from single-domain to cross-domain).In this survey, we initially define the CDSR problem using a four-dimensional tensor and then analyze its multi-type input representations under multidirectional dimensionality reductions. Following that, we provide a systematic overview from both macro and micro views. From a macro view, we abstract the multi-level fusion structures of various models across domains and discuss their bridges for fusion. From a micro view, focusing on the existing models, we specifically discuss the basic technologies and then explain the auxiliary learning technologies. Finally, we exhibit the available public datasets and the representative experimental results as well as provide some insights into future directions for research in CDSR.

Diffusion-EXR: Controllable Review Generation for Explainable Recommendation via Diffusion Models

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) has shown great competence in image and audio generation tasks. However, there exist few attempts to employ DDPM in the text generation, especially review generation under recommendation systems. Fueled by the predicted reviews explainability that justifies recommendations could assist users better understand the recommended items and increase the transparency of recommendation system, we propose a Diffusion Model-based Review Generation towards EXplainable Recommendation named Diffusion-EXR. Diffusion-EXR corrupts the sequence of review embeddings by incrementally introducing varied levels of Gaussian noise to the sequence of word embeddings and learns to reconstruct the original word representations in the reverse process. The nature of DDPM enables our lightweight Transformer backbone to perform excellently in the recommendation review generation task. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that Diffusion-EXR can achieve state-of-the-art review generation for recommendation on two publicly available benchmark datasets.

Future Impact Decomposition in Request-level Recommendations

In recommender systems, reinforcement learning solutions have shown promising results in optimizing the interaction sequence between users and the system over the long-term performance. For practical reasons, the policy's actions are typically designed as recommending a list of items to handle users' frequent and continuous browsing requests more efficiently. In this list-wise recommendation scenario, the user state is updated upon every request in the corresponding MDP formulation. However, this request-level formulation is essentially inconsistent with the user's item-level behavior. In this study, we demonstrate that an item-level optimization approach can better utilize item characteristics and optimize the policy's performance even under the request-level MDP. We support this claim by comparing the performance of standard request-level methods with the proposed item-level actor-critic framework in both simulation and online experiments. Furthermore, we show that a reward-based future decomposition strategy can better express the item-wise future impact and improve the recommendation accuracy in the long term. To achieve a more thorough understanding of the decomposition strategy, we propose a model-based re-weighting framework with adversarial learning that further boost the performance and investigate its correlation with the reward-based strategy.

TASER: Temporal Adaptive Sampling for Fast and Accurate Dynamic Graph Representation Learning

Recently, Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in various high-impact applications, including fraud detection and content recommendation. Despite the success of TGNNs, they are prone to the prevalent noise found in real-world dynamic graphs like time-deprecated links and skewed interaction distribution. The noise causes two critical issues that significantly compromise the accuracy of TGNNs: (1) models are supervised by inferior interactions, and (2) noisy input induces high variance in the aggregated messages. However, current TGNN denoising techniques do not consider the diverse and dynamic noise pattern of each node. In addition, they also suffer from the excessive mini-batch generation overheads caused by traversing more neighbors. We believe the remedy for fast and accurate TGNNs lies in temporal adaptive sampling. In this work, we propose TASER, the first adaptive sampling method for TGNNs optimized for accuracy, efficiency, and scalability. TASER adapts its mini-batch selection based on training dynamics and temporal neighbor selection based on the contextual, structural, and temporal properties of past interactions. To alleviate the bottleneck in mini-batch generation, TASER implements a pure GPU-based temporal neighbor finder and a dedicated GPU feature cache. We evaluate the performance of TASER using two state-of-the-art backbone TGNNs. On five popular datasets, TASER outperforms the corresponding baselines by an average of 2.3% in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) while achieving an average of 5.1x speedup in training time.

Agricultural Recommendation System based on Deep Learning: A Multivariate Weather Forecasting Approach

Bangladesh is predominantly an agricultural country, where the agrarian sector plays an essential role in accelerating economic growth and enabling the food security of the people. The performance of this sector has an overwhelming impact on the primary macroeconomic objectives like food security, employment generation, poverty alleviation, human resources development, and other economic and social forces. Although Bangladesh's labor-intensive agriculture has achieved steady increases in food grain production, it often suffered from unfavorable weather conditions such as heavy rainfall, low temperature, and drought. Consequently, these factors hinder the production of food substantially, putting the country's overall food security in danger. In order to have a profitable, sustainable, and farmer-friendly agricultural practice, this paper proposes a context-based crop recommendation system powered by a weather forecast model. With extensive evaluation, the multivariate Stacked Bi-LSTM Network is employed as the weather forecasting model. The proposed weather model can forecast Rainfall, Temperature, Humidity, and Sunshine for any given location in Bangladesh with higher accuracy. These predictions guide our system to assist the farmers in making feasible decisions about planting, irrigation, harvesting, and so on. Additionally, our full-fledged system is capable of alerting the farmers about extreme weather conditions so that preventive measures can be undertaken to protect the crops. Finally, the system is also adept at making knowledge-based crop suggestions for the flood and drought-prone regions of Bangladesh.

A Survey on Data-Centric Recommender Systems

Recommender systems (RSs) have become an essential tool for mitigating information overload in a range of real-world applications. Recent trends in RSs have revealed a major paradigm shift, moving the spotlight from model-centric innovations to data-centric efforts (e.g., improving data quality and quantity). This evolution has given rise to the concept of data-centric recommender systems (Data-Centric RSs), marking a significant development in the field. This survey provides the first systematic overview of Data-Centric RSs, covering 1) the foundational concepts of recommendation data and Data-Centric RSs; 2) three primary issues of recommendation data; 3) recent research developed to address these issues; and 4) several potential future directions of Data-Centric RSs.

Large Language Model-driven Meta-structure Discovery in Heterogeneous Information Network

Heterogeneous information networks (HIN) have gained increasing popularity for being able to capture complex relations between nodes of diverse types. Meta-structure was proposed to identify important patterns of relations on HIN, which has been proven effective for extracting rich semantic information and facilitating graph neural networks to learn expressive representations. However, hand-crafted meta-structures pose challenges for scaling up, which draws wide research attention for developing automatic meta-structure search algorithms. Previous efforts concentrate on searching for meta-structures with good empirical prediction performance, overlooking explainability. Thus, they often produce meta-structures prone to overfitting and incomprehensible to humans. To address this, we draw inspiration from the emergent reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). We propose a novel REasoning meta-STRUCTure search (ReStruct) framework that integrates LLM reasoning into the evolutionary procedure. ReStruct uses a grammar translator to encode meta-structures into natural language sentences, and leverages the reasoning power of LLMs to evaluate semantically feasible meta-structures. ReStruct also employs performance-oriented evolutionary operations. These two competing forces jointly optimize for semantic explainability and empirical performance of meta-structures. We also design a differential LLM explainer that can produce natural language explanations for the discovered meta-structures, and refine the explanation by reasoning through the search history. Experiments on five datasets demonstrate ReStruct achieve SOTA performance in node classification and link recommendation tasks. Additionally, a survey study involving 73 graduate students shows that the meta-structures and natural language explanations generated by ReStruct are substantially more comprehensible.

DualVAE: Dual Disentangled Variational AutoEncoder for Recommendation

Learning precise representations of users and items to fit observed interaction data is the fundamental task of collaborative filtering. Existing studies usually infer entangled representations to fit such interaction data, neglecting to model the diverse matching relationships between users and items behind their interactions, leading to limited performance and weak interpretability. To address this problem, we propose a Dual Disentangled Variational AutoEncoder (DualVAE) for collaborative recommendation, which combines disentangled representation learning with variational inference to facilitate the generation of implicit interaction data. Specifically, we first implement the disentangling concept by unifying an attention-aware dual disentanglement and disentangled variational autoencoder to infer the disentangled latent representations of users and items. Further, to encourage the correspondence and independence of disentangled representations of users and items, we design a neighborhood-enhanced representation constraint with a customized contrastive mechanism to improve the representation quality. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks show that our proposed model significantly outperforms several recent state-of-the-art baselines. Further empirical experimental results also illustrate the interpretability of the disentangled representations learned by DualVAE.

Contextual Multinomial Logit Bandits with General Value Functions

Contextual multinomial logit (MNL) bandits capture many real-world assortment recommendation problems such as online retailing/advertising. However, prior work has only considered (generalized) linear value functions, which greatly limits its applicability. Motivated by this fact, in this work, we consider contextual MNL bandits with a general value function class that contains the ground truth, borrowing ideas from a recent trend of studies on contextual bandits. Specifically, we consider both the stochastic and the adversarial settings, and propose a suite of algorithms, each with different computation-regret trade-off. When applied to the linear case, our results not only are the first ones with no dependence on a certain problem-dependent constant that can be exponentially large, but also enjoy other advantages such as computational efficiency, dimension-free regret bounds, or the ability to handle completely adversarial contexts and rewards.