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Jianxun Lian

Publications and source records attributed to Jianxun Lian.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2024

Ada-Retrieval: An Adaptive Multi-Round Retrieval Paradigm for Sequential Recommendations

Retrieval models aim at selecting a small set of item candidates which match the preference of a given user. They play a vital role in large-scale recommender systems since subsequent models such as rankers highly depend on the quality of item candidates. However, most existing retrieval models employ a single-round inference paradigm, which may not adequately capture the dynamic nature of user preferences and stuck in one area in the item space. In this paper, we propose Ada-Retrieval, an adaptive multi-round retrieval paradigm for recommender systems that iteratively refines user representations to better capture potential candidates in the full item space. Ada-Retrieval comprises two key modules: the item representation adapter and the user representation adapter, designed to inject context information into items' and users' representations. The framework maintains a model-agnostic design, allowing seamless integration with various backbone models such as RNNs or Transformers. We perform experiments on three widely used public datasets, incorporating five powerful sequential recommenders as backbone models. Our results demonstrate that Ada-Retrieval significantly enhances the performance of various base models, with consistent improvements observed across different datasets. Our code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/ll0ruc/Ada-Retrieval.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2024

Recommender AI Agent: Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive Recommendations

Recommender models excel at providing domain-specific item recommendations by leveraging extensive user behavior data. Despite their ability to act as lightweight domain experts, they struggle to perform versatile tasks such as providing explanations and engaging in conversations. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) represent a significant step towards artificial general intelligence, showcasing remarkable capabilities in instruction comprehension, commonsense reasoning, and human interaction. However, LLMs lack the knowledge of domain-specific item catalogs and behavioral patterns, particularly in areas that diverge from general world knowledge, such as online e-commerce. Finetuning LLMs for each domain is neither economic nor efficient. In this paper, we bridge the gap between recommender models and LLMs, combining their respective strengths to create a versatile and interactive recommender system. We introduce an efficient framework called \textbf{InteRecAgent}, which employs LLMs as the brain and recommender models as tools. We first outline a minimal set of essential tools required to transform LLMs into InteRecAgent. We then propose an efficient workflow within InteRecAgent for task execution, incorporating key components such as memory components, dynamic demonstration-augmented task planning, and reflection. InteRecAgent enables traditional recommender systems, such as those ID-based matrix factorization models, to become interactive systems with a natural language interface through the integration of LLMs. Experimental results on several public datasets show that InteRecAgent achieves satisfying performance as a conversational recommender system, outperforming general-purpose LLMs. The source code of InteRecAgent is released at https://aka.ms/recagent.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2023

Knowledge Plugins: Enhancing Large Language Models for Domain-Specific Recommendations

The significant progress of large language models (LLMs) provides a promising opportunity to build human-like systems for various practical applications. However, when applied to specific task domains, an LLM pre-trained on a general-purpose corpus may exhibit a deficit or inadequacy in two types of domain-specific knowledge. One is a comprehensive set of domain data that is typically large-scale and continuously evolving. The other is specific working patterns of this domain reflected in the data. The absence or inadequacy of such knowledge impacts the performance of the LLM. In this paper, we propose a general paradigm that augments LLMs with DOmain-specific KnowledgE to enhance their performance on practical applications, namely DOKE. This paradigm relies on a domain knowledge extractor, working in three steps: 1) preparing effective knowledge for the task; 2) selecting the knowledge for each specific sample; and 3) expressing the knowledge in an LLM-understandable way. Then, the extracted knowledge is incorporated through prompts, without any computational cost of model fine-tuning. We instantiate the general paradigm on a widespread application, i.e. recommender systems, where critical item attributes and collaborative filtering signals are incorporated. Experimental results demonstrate that DOKE can substantially improve the performance of LLMs in specific domains.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2023

Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli

Emotional intelligence significantly impacts our daily behaviors and interactions. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly viewed as a stride toward artificial general intelligence, exhibiting impressive performance in numerous tasks, it is still uncertain if LLMs can genuinely grasp psychological emotional stimuli. Understanding and responding to emotional cues gives humans a distinct advantage in problem-solving. In this paper, we take the first step towards exploring the ability of LLMs to understand emotional stimuli. To this end, we first conduct automatic experiments on 45 tasks using various LLMs, including Flan-T5-Large, Vicuna, Llama 2, BLOOM, ChatGPT, and GPT-4. Our tasks span deterministic and generative applications that represent comprehensive evaluation scenarios. Our automatic experiments show that LLMs have a grasp of emotional intelligence, and their performance can be improved with emotional prompts (which we call "EmotionPrompt" that combines the original prompt with emotional stimuli), e.g., 8.00% relative performance improvement in Instruction Induction and 115% in BIG-Bench. In addition to those deterministic tasks that can be automatically evaluated using existing metrics, we conducted a human study with 106 participants to assess the quality of generative tasks using both vanilla and emotional prompts. Our human study results demonstrate that EmotionPrompt significantly boosts the performance of generative tasks (10.9% average improvement in terms of performance, truthfulness, and responsibility metrics). We provide an in-depth discussion regarding why EmotionPrompt works for LLMs and the factors that may influence its performance. We posit that EmotionPrompt heralds a novel avenue for exploring interdisciplinary knowledge for human-LLMs interaction.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

A Data-Centric Multi-Objective Learning Framework for Responsible Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems effectively guide users in locating their desired information within extensive content repositories. Generally, a recommendation model is optimized to enhance accuracy metrics from a user utility standpoint, such as click-through rate or matching relevance. However, a responsible industrial recommendation system must address not only user utility (responsibility to users) but also other objectives, including increasing platform revenue (responsibility to platforms), ensuring fairness (responsibility to content creators), and maintaining unbiasedness (responsibility to long-term healthy development). Multi-objective learning is a potent approach for achieving responsible recommendation systems. Nevertheless, current methods encounter two challenges: difficulty in scaling to heterogeneous objectives within a unified framework, and inadequate controllability over objective priority during optimization, leading to uncontrollable solutions. In this paper, we present a data-centric optimization framework, MoRec, which unifies the learning of diverse objectives. MoRec is a tri-level framework: the outer level manages the balance between different objectives, utilizing a proportional-integral-derivative (PID)-based controller to ensure a preset regularization on the primary objective. The middle level transforms objective-aware optimization into data sampling weights using sign gradients. The inner level employs a standard optimizer to update model parameters with the sampled data. Consequently, MoRec can flexibly support various objectives while maintaining the original model intact. Comprehensive experiments on two public datasets and one industrial dataset showcase the effectiveness, controllability, flexibility, and Pareto efficiency of MoRec, making it highly suitable for real-world implementation.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2023

ConvFormer: Revisiting Transformer for Sequential User Modeling

Sequential user modeling, a critical task in personalized recommender systems, focuses on predicting the next item a user would prefer, requiring a deep understanding of user behavior sequences. Despite the remarkable success of Transformer-based models across various domains, their full potential in comprehending user behavior remains untapped. In this paper, we re-examine Transformer-like architectures aiming to advance state-of-the-art performance. We start by revisiting the core building blocks of Transformer-based methods, analyzing the effectiveness of the item-to-item mechanism within the context of sequential user modeling. After conducting a thorough experimental analysis, we identify three essential criteria for devising efficient sequential user models, which we hope will serve as practical guidelines to inspire and shape future designs. Following this, we introduce ConvFormer, a simple but powerful modification to the Transformer architecture that meets these criteria, yielding state-of-the-art results. Additionally, we present an acceleration technique to minimize the complexity associated with processing extremely long sequences. Experiments on four public datasets showcase ConvFormer's superiority and confirm the validity of our proposed criteria.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2023

Towards Better Entity Linking with Multi-View Enhanced Distillation

Dense retrieval is widely used for entity linking to retrieve entities from large-scale knowledge bases. Mainstream techniques are based on a dual-encoder framework, which encodes mentions and entities independently and calculates their relevances via rough interaction metrics, resulting in difficulty in explicitly modeling multiple mention-relevant parts within entities to match divergent mentions. Aiming at learning entity representations that can match divergent mentions, this paper proposes a Multi-View Enhanced Distillation (MVD) framework, which can effectively transfer knowledge of multiple fine-grained and mention-relevant parts within entities from cross-encoders to dual-encoders. Each entity is split into multiple views to avoid irrelevant information being over-squashed into the mention-relevant view. We further design cross-alignment and self-alignment mechanisms for this framework to facilitate fine-grained knowledge distillation from the teacher model to the student model. Meanwhile, we reserve a global-view that embeds the entity as a whole to prevent dispersal of uniform information. Experiments show our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several entity linking benchmarks.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

Towards Explainable Collaborative Filtering with Taste Clusters Learning

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a widely used and effective technique for recommender systems. In recent decades, there have been significant advancements in latent embedding-based CF methods for improved accuracy, such as matrix factorization, neural collaborative filtering, and LightGCN. However, the explainability of these models has not been fully explored. Adding explainability to recommendation models can not only increase trust in the decisionmaking process, but also have multiple benefits such as providing persuasive explanations for item recommendations, creating explicit profiles for users and items, and assisting item producers in design improvements. In this paper, we propose a neat and effective Explainable Collaborative Filtering (ECF) model that leverages interpretable cluster learning to achieve the two most demanding objectives: (1) Precise - the model should not compromise accuracy in the pursuit of explainability; and (2) Self-explainable - the model's explanations should truly reflect its decision-making process, not generated from post-hoc methods. The core of ECF is mining taste clusters from user-item interactions and item profiles.We map each user and item to a sparse set of taste clusters, and taste clusters are distinguished by a few representative tags. The user-item preference, users/items' cluster affiliations, and the generation of taste clusters are jointly optimized in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a forest mechanism to ensure the model's accuracy, explainability, and diversity. To comprehensively evaluate the explainability quality of taste clusters, we design several quantitative metrics, including in-cluster item coverage, tag utilization, silhouette, and informativeness. Our model's effectiveness is demonstrated through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2023

Distillation from Heterogeneous Models for Top-K Recommendation

Recent recommender systems have shown remarkable performance by using an ensemble of heterogeneous models. However, it is exceedingly costly because it requires resources and inference latency proportional to the number of models, which remains the bottleneck for production. Our work aims to transfer the ensemble knowledge of heterogeneous teachers to a lightweight student model using knowledge distillation (KD), to reduce the huge inference costs while retaining high accuracy. Through an empirical study, we find that the efficacy of distillation severely drops when transferring knowledge from heterogeneous teachers. Nevertheless, we show that an important signal to ease the difficulty can be obtained from the teacher's training trajectory. This paper proposes a new KD framework, named HetComp, that guides the student model by transferring easy-to-hard sequences of knowledge generated from the teachers' trajectories. To provide guidance according to the student's learning state, HetComp uses dynamic knowledge construction to provide progressively difficult ranking knowledge and adaptive knowledge transfer to gradually transfer finer-grained ranking information. Our comprehensive experiments show that HetComp significantly improves the distillation quality and the generalization of the student model.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2022

Geometric Interaction Augmented Graph Collaborative Filtering

Graph-based collaborative filtering is capable of capturing the essential and abundant collaborative signals from the high-order interactions, and thus received increasingly research interests. Conventionally, the embeddings of users and items are defined in the Euclidean spaces, along with the propagation on the interaction graphs. Meanwhile, recent works point out that the high-order interactions naturally form up the tree-likeness structures, which the hyperbolic models thrive on. However, the interaction graphs inherently exhibit the hybrid and nested geometric characteristics, while the existing single geometry-based models are inadequate to fully capture such sophisticated topological patterns. In this paper, we propose to model the user-item interactions in a hybrid geometric space, in which the merits of Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces are simultaneously enjoyed to learn expressive representations. Experimental results on public datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposal.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2022

Negative Sampling for Contrastive Representation Learning: A Review

The learn-to-compare paradigm of contrastive representation learning (CRL), which compares positive samples with negative ones for representation learning, has achieved great success in a wide range of domains, including natural language processing, computer vision, information retrieval and graph learning. While many research works focus on data augmentations, nonlinear transformations or other certain parts of CRL, the importance of negative sample selection is usually overlooked in literature. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of negative sampling (NS) techniques and discuss how they contribute to the success of CRL. As the core part of this paper, we summarize the existing NS methods into four categories with pros and cons in each genre, and further conclude with several open research questions as future directions. By generalizing and aligning the fundamental NS ideas across multiple domains, we hope this survey can accelerate cross-domain knowledge sharing and motivate future researches for better CRL.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2022

Ada-Ranker: A Data Distribution Adaptive Ranking Paradigm for Sequential Recommendation

A large-scale recommender system usually consists of recall and ranking modules. The goal of ranking modules (aka rankers) is to elaborately discriminate users' preference on item candidates proposed by recall modules. With the success of deep learning techniques in various domains, we have witnessed the mainstream rankers evolve from traditional models to deep neural models. However, the way that we design and use rankers remains unchanged: offline training the model, freezing the parameters, and deploying it for online serving. Actually, the candidate items are determined by specific user requests, in which underlying distributions (e.g., the proportion of items for different categories, the proportion of popular or new items) are highly different from one another in a production environment. The classical parameter-frozen inference manner cannot adapt to dynamic serving circumstances, making rankers' performance compromised. In this paper, we propose a new training and inference paradigm, termed as Ada-Ranker, to address the challenges of dynamic online serving. Instead of using parameter-frozen models for universal serving, Ada-Ranker can adaptively modulate parameters of a ranker according to the data distribution of the current group of item candidates. We first extract distribution patterns from the item candidates. Then, we modulate the ranker by the patterns to make the ranker adapt to the current data distribution. Finally, we use the revised ranker to score the candidate list. In this way, we empower the ranker with the capacity of adapting from a global model to a local model which better handles the current task.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2022

A Mutually Reinforced Framework for Pretrained Sentence Embeddings

The lack of labeled data is a major obstacle to learning high-quality sentence embeddings. Recently, self-supervised contrastive learning (SCL) is regarded as a promising way to address this problem. However, the existing works mainly rely on hand-crafted data annotation heuristics to generate positive training samples, which not only call for domain expertise and laborious tuning, but are also prone to the following unfavorable cases: 1) trivial positives, 2) coarse-grained positives, and 3) false positives. As a result, the self-supervision's quality can be severely limited in reality. In this work, we propose a novel framework InfoCSE to address the above problems. Instead of relying on annotation heuristics defined by humans, it leverages the sentence representation model itself and realizes the following iterative self-supervision process: on one hand, the improvement of sentence representation may contribute to the quality of data annotation; on the other hand, more effective data annotation helps to generate high-quality positive samples, which will further improve the current sentence representation model. In other words, the representation learning and data annotation become mutually reinforced, where a strong self-supervision effect can be derived. Extensive experiments are performed based on three benchmark datasets, where notable improvements can be achieved against the existing SCL-based methods.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2021

Show Me the Whole World: Towards Entire Item Space Exploration for Interactive Personalized Recommendations

User interest exploration is an important and challenging topic in recommender systems, which alleviates the closed-loop effects between recommendation models and user-item interactions. Contextual bandit (CB) algorithms strive to make a good trade-off between exploration and exploitation so that users' potential interests have chances to expose. However, classical CB algorithms can only be applied to a small, sampled item set (usually hundreds), which forces the typical applications in recommender systems limited to candidate post-ranking, homepage top item ranking, ad creative selection, or online model selection (A/B test). In this paper, we introduce two simple but effective hierarchical CB algorithms to make a classical CB model (such as LinUCB and Thompson Sampling) capable to explore users' interest in the entire item space without limiting it to a small item set. We first construct a hierarchy item tree via a bottom-up clustering algorithm to organize items in a coarse-to-fine manner. Then we propose a hierarchical CB (HCB) algorithm to explore users' interest in the hierarchy tree. HCB takes the exploration problem as a series of decision-making processes, where the goal is to find a path from the root to a leaf node, and the feedback will be back-propagated to all the nodes in the path. We further propose a progressive hierarchical CB (pHCB) algorithm, which progressively extends visible nodes which reach a confidence level for exploration, to avoid misleading actions on upper-level nodes in the sequential decision-making process. Extensive experiments on two public recommendation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our methods.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2021

Self-supervised Graph Learning for Recommendation

Representation learning on user-item graph for recommendation has evolved from using single ID or interaction history to exploiting higher-order neighbors. This leads to the success of graph convolution networks (GCNs) for recommendation such as PinSage and LightGCN. Despite effectiveness, we argue that they suffer from two limitations: (1) high-degree nodes exert larger impact on the representation learning, deteriorating the recommendations of low-degree (long-tail) items; and (2) representations are vulnerable to noisy interactions, as the neighborhood aggregation scheme further enlarges the impact of observed edges. In this work, we explore self-supervised learning on user-item graph, so as to improve the accuracy and robustness of GCNs for recommendation. The idea is to supplement the classical supervised task of recommendation with an auxiliary self-supervised task, which reinforces node representation learning via self-discrimination. Specifically, we generate multiple views of a node, maximizing the agreement between different views of the same node compared to that of other nodes. We devise three operators to generate the views -- node dropout, edge dropout, and random walk -- that change the graph structure in different manners. We term this new learning paradigm as \textit{Self-supervised Graph Learning} (SGL), implementing it on the state-of-the-art model LightGCN. Through theoretical analyses, we find that SGL has the ability of automatically mining hard negatives. Empirical studies on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SGL, which improves the recommendation accuracy, especially on long-tail items, and the robustness against interaction noises. Our implementations are available at \url{https://github.com/wujcan/SGL}.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2021

Graph Convolution Machine for Context-aware Recommender System

The latest advance in recommendation shows that better user and item representations can be learned via performing graph convolutions on the user-item interaction graph. However, such finding is mostly restricted to the collaborative filtering (CF) scenario, where the interaction contexts are not available. In this work, we extend the advantages of graph convolutions to context-aware recommender system (CARS, which represents a generic type of models that can handle various side information). We propose \textit{Graph Convolution Machine} (GCM), an end-to-end framework that consists of three components: an encoder, graph convolution (GC) layers, and a decoder. The encoder projects users, items, and contexts into embedding vectors, which are passed to the GC layers that refine user and item embeddings with context-aware graph convolutions on user-item graph. The decoder digests the refined embeddings to output the prediction score by considering the interactions among user, item, and context embeddings. We conduct experiments on three real-world datasets from Yelp and Amazon, validating the effectiveness of GCM and the benefits of performing graph convolutions for CARS. Our implementations are available at \url{https://github.com/wujcan/GCM}.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2021

Multi-Interest-Aware User Modeling for Large-Scale Sequential Recommendations

Precise user modeling is critical for online personalized recommendation services. Generally, users' interests are diverse and are not limited to a single aspect, which is particularly evident when their behaviors are observed for a longer time. For example, a user may demonstrate interests in cats/dogs, dancing and food \& delights when browsing short videos on Tik Tok; the same user may show interests in real estate and women's wear in her web browsing behaviors. Traditional models tend to encode a user's behaviors into a single embedding vector, which do not have enough capacity to effectively capture her diverse interests. This paper proposes a Sequential User Matrix (SUM) to accurately and efficiently capture users' diverse interests. SUM models user behavior with a multi-channel network, with each channel representing a different aspect of the user's interests. User states in different channels are updated by an \emph{erase-and-add} paradigm with interest- and instance-level attention. We further propose a local proximity debuff component and a highway connection component to make the model more robust and accurate. SUM can be maintained and updated incrementally, making it feasible to be deployed for large-scale online serving. We conduct extensive experiments on two datasets. Results demonstrate that SUM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2021

Hybrid Encoder: Towards Efficient and Precise Native AdsRecommendation via Hybrid Transformer Encoding Networks

Transformer encoding networks have been proved to be a powerful tool of understanding natural languages. They are playing a critical role in native ads service, which facilitates the recommendation of appropriate ads based on user's web browsing history. For the sake of efficient recommendation, conventional methods would generate user and advertisement embeddings independently with a siamese transformer encoder, such that approximate nearest neighbour search (ANN) can be leveraged. Given that the underlying semantic about user and ad can be complicated, such independently generated embeddings are prone to information loss, which leads to inferior recommendation quality. Although another encoding strategy, the cross encoder, can be much more accurate, it will lead to huge running cost and become infeasible for realtime services, like native ads recommendation. In this work, we propose hybrid encoder, which makes efficient and precise native ads recommendation through two consecutive steps: retrieval and ranking. In the retrieval step, user and ad are encoded with a siamese component, which enables relevant candidates to be retrieved via ANN search. In the ranking step, it further represents each ad with disentangled embeddings and each user with ad-related embeddings, which contributes to the fine-grained selection of high-quality ads from the candidate set. Both steps are light-weighted, thanks to the pre-computed and cached intermedia results. To optimize the hybrid encoder's performance in this two-stage workflow, a progressive training pipeline is developed, which builds up the model's capability in the retrieval and ranking task step-by-step. The hybrid encoder's effectiveness is experimentally verified: with very little additional cost, it outperforms the siamese encoder significantly and achieves comparable recommendation quality as the cross encoder.

cs.IR↗