EXIT: An EXplicit Interest Transfer Framework for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Cross-domain recommendation has attracted substantial interest in industrial apps such as Meituan, which serves multiple business domains via knowledge transfer and meets the diverse interests of users. However, existing methods typically follow an implicit modeling paradigm that blends the knowledge from both the source and target domains, and design intricate network structures to share learned embeddings or patterns between domains to improve recommendation accuracy. Since the transfer of interest signals is unsupervised, these implicit paradigms often struggle with the negative transfer resulting from differences in service functions and presentation forms across different domains. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective EXplicit Interest Transfer framework named EXIT to address the stated challenge. Specifically, we propose a novel label combination approach that enables the model to directly learn beneficial source domain interests through supervised learning, while excluding inappropriate interest signals. Moreover, we introduce a scene selector network to model the interest transfer intensity under fine-grained scenes. Offline experiments conducted on the industrial production dataset and online A/B tests validate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed framework. Without complex network structures or training processes, EXIT can be easily deployed in the industrial recommendation system. EXIT has been successfully deployed in the online homepage recommendation system of Meituan App, serving the main traffic.

PREFER: Prompt Ensemble Learning via Feedback-Reflect-Refine

As an effective tool for eliciting the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompting has recently demonstrated unprecedented abilities across a variety of complex tasks. To further improve the performance, prompt ensemble has attracted substantial interest for tackling the hallucination and instability of LLMs. However, existing methods usually adopt a two-stage paradigm, which requires a pre-prepared set of prompts with substantial manual effort, and is unable to perform directed optimization for different weak learners. In this paper, we propose a simple, universal, and automatic method named PREFER (Pompt Ensemble learning via Feedback-Reflect-Refine) to address the stated limitations. Specifically, given the fact that weak learners are supposed to focus on hard examples during boosting, PREFER builds a feedback mechanism for reflecting on the inadequacies of existing weak learners. Based on this, the LLM is required to automatically synthesize new prompts for iterative refinement. Moreover, to enhance stability of the prompt effect evaluation, we propose a novel prompt bagging method involving forward and backward thinking, which is superior to majority voting and is beneficial for both feedback and weight calculation in boosting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PREFER achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple types of tasks by a significant margin. We have made our code publicly available.

Enhancing Personalized Ranking With Differentiable Group AUC Optimization

AUC is a common metric for evaluating the performance of a classifier. However, most classifiers are trained with cross entropy, and it does not optimize the AUC metric directly, which leaves a gap between the training and evaluation stage. In this paper, we propose the PDAOM loss, a Personalized and Differentiable AUC Optimization method with Maximum violation, which can be directly applied when training a binary classifier and optimized with gradient-based methods. Specifically, we construct the pairwise exponential loss with difficult pair of positive and negative samples within sub-batches grouped by user ID, aiming to guide the classifier to pay attention to the relation between hard-distinguished pairs of opposite samples from the perspective of independent users. Compared to the origin form of pairwise exponential loss, the proposed PDAOM loss not only improves the AUC and GAUC metrics in the offline evaluation, but also reduces the computation complexity of the training objective. Furthermore, online evaluation of the PDAOM loss on the 'Guess What You Like' feed recommendation application in Meituan manifests 1.40% increase in click count and 0.65% increase in order count compared to the baseline model, which is a significant improvement in this well-developed online life service recommendation system.

A time-varying study of Chinese investor sentiment, stock market liquidity and volatility: Based on deep learning BERT model and TVP-VAR model

Based on the commentary data of the Shenzhen Stock Index bar on the EastMoney website from January 1, 2018 to December 31, 2019. This paper extracts the embedded investor sentiment by using a deep learning BERT model and investigates the time-varying linkage between investment sentiment, stock market liquidity and volatility using a TVP-VAR model. The results show that the impact of investor sentiment on stock market liquidity and volatility is stronger. Although the inverse effect is relatively small, it is more pronounced with the state of the stock market. In all cases, the response is more pronounced in the short term than in the medium to long term, and the impact is asymmetric, with shocks stronger when the market is in a downward spiral.

Deep learning based Chinese text sentiment mining and stock market correlation research

We explore how to crawl financial forum data such as stock bars and combine them with deep learning models for sentiment analysis. In this paper, we will use the BERT model to train against the financial corpus and predict the SZSE Component Index, and find that applying the BERT model to the financial corpus through the maximum information coefficient comparison study. The obtained sentiment features will be able to reflect the fluctuations in the stock market and help to improve the prediction accuracy effectively. Meanwhile, this paper combines deep learning with financial text, in further exploring the mechanism of investor sentiment on stock market through deep learning method, which will be beneficial for national regulators and policy departments to develop more reasonable policy guidelines for maintaining the stability of stock market.

Research on the correlation between text emotion mining and stock market based on deep learning

This paper discusses how to crawl the data of financial forums such as stock bar, and conduct emotional analysis combined with the in-depth learning model. This paper will use the Bert model to train the financial corpus and predict the Shenzhen stock index. Through the comparative study of the maximal information coefficient (MIC), it is found that the emotional characteristics obtained by applying the BERT model to the financial corpus can be reflected in the fluctuation of the stock market, which is conducive to effectively improve the prediction accuracy. At the same time, this paper combines in-depth learning with financial texts to further explore the impact mechanism of investor sentiment on the stock market through in-depth learning, which will help the national regulatory authorities and policy departments to formulate more reasonable policies and guidelines for maintaining the stability of the stock market.

Optimizing Multiple Performance Metrics with Deep GSP Auctions for E-commerce Advertising

In e-commerce advertising, the ad platform usually relies on auction mechanisms to optimize different performance metrics, such as user experience, advertiser utility, and platform revenue. However, most of the state-of-the-art auction mechanisms only focus on optimizing a single performance metric, e.g., either social welfare or revenue, and are not suitable for e-commerce advertising with various, dynamic, difficult to estimate, and even conflicting performance metrics. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism called Deep GSP auction, which leverages deep learning to design new rank score functions within the celebrated GSP auction framework. These new rank score functions are implemented via deep neural network models under the constraints of monotone allocation and smooth transition. The requirement of monotone allocation ensures Deep GSP auction nice game theoretical properties, while the requirement of smooth transition guarantees the advertiser utilities would not fluctuate too much when the auction mechanism switches among candidate mechanisms to achieve different optimization objectives. We deployed the proposed mechanisms in a leading e-commerce ad platform and conducted comprehensive experimental evaluations with both offline simulations and online A/B tests. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the Deep GSP auction compared to the state-of-the-art auction mechanisms.

TGG: Transferable Graph Generation for Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning

Zero-shot and few-shot learning aim to improve generalization to unseen concepts, which are promising in many realistic scenarios. Due to the lack of data in unseen domain, relation modeling between seen and unseen domains is vital for knowledge transfer in these tasks. Most existing methods capture seen-unseen relation implicitly via semantic embedding or feature generation, resulting in inadequate use of relation and some issues remain (e.g. domain shift). To tackle these challenges, we propose a Transferable Graph Generation (TGG) approach, in which the relation is modeled and utilized explicitly via graph generation. Specifically, our proposed TGG contains two main components: (1) Graph generation for relation modeling. An attention-based aggregate network and a relation kernel are proposed, which generate instance-level graph based on a class-level prototype graph and visual features. Proximity information aggregating is guided by a multi-head graph attention mechanism, where seen and unseen features synthesized by GAN are revised as node embeddings. The relation kernel further generates edges with GCN and graph kernel method, to capture instance-level topological structure while tackling data imbalance and noise. (2) Relation propagation for relation utilization. A dual relation propagation approach is proposed, where relations captured by the generated graph are separately propagated from the seen and unseen subgraphs. The two propagations learn from each other in a dual learning fashion, which performs as an adaptation way for mitigating domain shift. All components are jointly optimized with a meta-learning strategy, and our TGG acts as an end-to-end framework unifying conventional zero-shot, generalized zero-shot and few-shot learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that it consistently surpasses existing methods of the above three fields by a significant margin.

Visual Data Synthesis via GAN for Zero-Shot Video Classification

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) in video classification is a promising research direction, which aims to tackle the challenge from explosive growth of video categories. Most existing methods exploit seen-to-unseen correlation via learning a projection between visual and semantic spaces. However, such projection-based paradigms cannot fully utilize the discriminative information implied in data distribution, and commonly suffer from the information degradation issue caused by "heterogeneity gap". In this paper, we propose a visual data synthesis framework via GAN to address these problems. Specifically, both semantic knowledge and visual distribution are leveraged to synthesize video feature of unseen categories, and ZSL can be turned into typical supervised problem with the synthetic features. First, we propose multi-level semantic inference to boost video feature synthesis, which captures the discriminative information implied in joint visual-semantic distribution via feature-level and label-level semantic inference. Second, we propose Matching-aware Mutual Information Correlation to overcome information degradation issue, which captures seen-to-unseen correlation in matched and mismatched visual-semantic pairs by mutual information, providing the zero-shot synthesis procedure with robust guidance signals. Experimental results on four video datasets demonstrate that our approach can improve the zero-shot video classification performance significantly.

Better and Faster: Knowledge Transfer from Multiple Self-supervised Learning Tasks via Graph Distillation for Video Classification

Video representation learning is a vital problem for classification task. Recently, a promising unsupervised paradigm termed self-supervised learning has emerged, which explores inherent supervisory signals implied in massive data for feature learning via solving auxiliary tasks. However, existing methods in this regard suffer from two limitations when extended to video classification. First, they focus only on a single task, whereas ignoring complementarity among different task-specific features and thus resulting in suboptimal video representation. Second, high computational and memory cost hinders their application in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a graph-based distillation framework to address these problems: (1) We propose logits graph and representation graph to transfer knowledge from multiple self-supervised tasks, where the former distills classifier-level knowledge by solving a multi-distribution joint matching problem, and the latter distills internal feature knowledge from pairwise ensembled representations with tackling the challenge of heterogeneity among different features; (2) The proposal that adopts a teacher-student framework can reduce the redundancy of knowledge learnt from teachers dramatically, leading to a lighter student model that solves classification task more efficiently. Experimental results on 3 video datasets validate that our proposal not only helps learn better video representation but also compress model for faster inference.