arXiv subjects

Shuxian Bi

Publications and source records attributed to Shuxian Bi.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Proactive Recommendation in Social Networks: Steering User Interest with Causal Inference

Recommending items that solely cater to users' historical interests narrows users' horizons. Recent works have considered steering target users beyond their historical interests by directly adjusting items exposed to them. However, the recommended items for direct steering might not align perfectly with the evolution of users' interests, detrimentally affecting the target users' experience. To avoid this issue, we propose a new task named Proactive Recommendation in Social Networks (PRSN) that indirectly steers users' interest by utilizing the influence of social neighbors, i.e., indirect steering by adjusting the exposure of a target item to target users' neighbors. The key to PRSN lies in answering an interventional question: what would a target user' s feedback be on a target item if the item is exposed to the user' s different neighbors? To answer this question, we resort to causal inference and formalize PRSN as: (1) estimating the potential feedback of a user on an item, under the network interference by the item' s exposure to the user' s neighbors; and (2) adjusting the exposure of a target item to target users' neighbors to trade off steering performance and the damage to the neighbors' experience. To this end, we propose a Neighbor Interference Recommendation (NIRec) framework with two modules: (1) an interference representation-based estimation module for modeling potential feedback; (2) a post-learning-based optimization module for adjusting a target item' s exposure to trade off steering performance and the neighbors' experience through greedy search. We conduct extensive semi-simulation experiments on real-world datasets, validating the steering effectiveness of NIRec.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Leveraging LLMs for Influence Path Planning in Proactive Recommendation

Recommender systems are pivotal in Internet social platforms, yet they often cater to users' historical interests, leading to critical issues like echo chambers. To broaden user horizons, proactive recommender systems aim to guide user interest to gradually like a target item beyond historical interests through an influence path,i.e., a sequence of recommended items. As a representative, Influential Recommender System (IRS) designs a sequential model for influence path planning but faces issues of lacking target item inclusion and path coherence. To address the issues, we leverage the advanced planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and propose an LLM-based Influence Path Planning (LLM-IPP) method. LLM-IPP generates coherent and effective influence paths by capturing user interest shifts and item characteristics. We introduce novel evaluation metrics and user simulators to benchmark LLM-IPP against traditional methods. Our experiments demonstrate that LLM-IPP significantly enhances user acceptability and path coherence, outperforming existing approaches.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Proactive Recommendation with Iterative Preference Guidance

Recommender systems mainly tailor personalized recommendations according to user interests learned from user feedback. However, such recommender systems passively cater to user interests and even reinforce existing interests in the feedback loop, leading to problems like filter bubbles and opinion polarization. To counteract this, proactive recommendation actively steers users towards developing new interests in a target item or topic by strategically modulating recommendation sequences. Existing work for proactive recommendation faces significant hurdles: 1) overlooking the user feedback in the guidance process; 2) lacking explicit modeling of the guiding objective; and 3) insufficient flexibility for integration into existing industrial recommender systems. To address these issues, we introduce an Iterative Preference Guidance (IPG) framework. IPG performs proactive recommendation in a flexible post-processing manner by ranking items according to their IPG scores that consider both interaction probability and guiding value. These scores are explicitly estimated with iteratively updated user representation that considers the most recent user interactions. Extensive experiments validate that IPG can effectively guide user interests toward target interests with a reasonable trade-off in recommender accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/GabyUSTC/IPG-Rec.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

On the Equivalence of Decoupled Graph Convolution Network and Label Propagation

The original design of Graph Convolution Network (GCN) couples feature transformation and neighborhood aggregation for node representation learning. Recently, some work shows that coupling is inferior to decoupling, which supports deep graph propagation better and has become the latest paradigm of GCN (e.g., APPNP and SGCN). Despite effectiveness, the working mechanisms of the decoupled GCN are not well understood. In this paper, we explore the decoupled GCN for semi-supervised node classification from a novel and fundamental perspective -- label propagation. We conduct thorough theoretical analyses, proving that the decoupled GCN is essentially the same as the two-step label propagation: first, propagating the known labels along the graph to generate pseudo-labels for the unlabeled nodes, and second, training normal neural network classifiers on the augmented pseudo-labeled data. More interestingly, we reveal the effectiveness of decoupled GCN: going beyond the conventional label propagation, it could automatically assign structure- and model- aware weights to the pseudo-label data. This explains why the decoupled GCN is relatively robust to the structure noise and over-smoothing, but sensitive to the label noise and model initialization. Based on this insight, we propose a new label propagation method named Propagation then Training Adaptively (PTA), which overcomes the flaws of the decoupled GCN with a dynamic and adaptive weighting strategy. Our PTA is simple yet more effective and robust than decoupled GCN. We empirically validate our findings on four benchmark datasets, demonstrating the advantages of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/DongHande/PT_propagation_then_training.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Data Augmentation View on Graph Convolutional Network and the Proposal of Monte Carlo Graph Learning

Today, there are two major understandings for graph convolutional networks, i.e., in the spectral and spatial domain. But both lack transparency. In this work, we introduce a new understanding for it -- data augmentation, which is more transparent than the previous understandings. Inspired by it, we propose a new graph learning paradigm -- Monte Carlo Graph Learning (MCGL). The core idea of MCGL contains: (1) Data augmentation: propagate the labels of the training set through the graph structure and expand the training set; (2) Model training: use the expanded training set to train traditional classifiers. We use synthetic datasets to compare the strengths of MCGL and graph convolutional operation on clean graphs. In addition, we show that MCGL's tolerance to graph structure noise is weaker than GCN on noisy graphs (four real-world datasets). Moreover, inspired by MCGL, we re-analyze the reasons why the performance of GCN becomes worse when deepened too much: rather than the mainstream view of over-smoothing, we argue that the main reason is the graph structure noise, and experimentally verify our view. The code is available at https://github.com/DongHande/MCGL.

cs.LG↗