Combining Incomplete Observational and Randomized Data for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

Data from observational studies (OSs) is widely available and readily obtainable yet frequently contains confounding biases. On the other hand, data derived from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) helps to reduce these biases; however, it is expensive to gather, resulting in a tiny size of randomized data. For this reason, effectively fusing observational data and randomized data to better estimate heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) has gained increasing attention. However, existing methods for integrating observational data with randomized data must require \textit{complete} observational data, meaning that both treated subjects and untreated subjects must be included in OSs. This prerequisite confines the applicability of such methods to very specific situations, given that including all subjects, whether treated or untreated, in observational studies is not consistently achievable. In our paper, we propose a resilient approach to \textbf{C}ombine \textbf{I}ncomplete \textbf{O}bservational data and randomized data for HTE estimation, which we abbreviate as \textbf{CIO}. The CIO is capable of estimating HTEs efficiently regardless of the completeness of the observational data, be it full or partial. Concretely, a confounding bias function is first derived using the pseudo-experimental group from OSs, in conjunction with the pseudo-control group from RCTs, via an effect estimation procedure. This function is subsequently utilized as a corrective residual to rectify the observed outcomes of observational data during the HTE estimation by combining the available observational data and the all randomized data. To validate our approach, we have conducted experiments on a synthetic dataset and two semi-synthetic datasets.

A Causal Explainable Guardrails for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in natural language tasks, but their outputs can exhibit undesirable attributes or biases. Existing methods for steering LLMs towards desired attributes often assume unbiased representations and rely solely on steering prompts. However, the representations learned from pre-training can introduce semantic biases that influence the steering process, leading to suboptimal results. We propose LLMGuardaril, a novel framework that incorporates causal analysis and adversarial learning to obtain unbiased steering representations in LLMs. LLMGuardaril systematically identifies and blocks the confounding effects of biases, enabling the extraction of unbiased steering representations. Additionally, it includes an explainable component that provides insights into the alignment between the generated output and the desired direction. Experiments demonstrate LLMGuardaril's effectiveness in steering LLMs towards desired attributes while mitigating biases. Our work contributes to the development of safe and reliable LLMs that align with desired attributes. We discuss the limitations and future research directions, highlighting the need for ongoing research to address the ethical implications of large language models.

Empowering Sequential Recommendation from Collaborative Signals and Semantic Relatedness

Sequential recommender systems (SRS) could capture dynamic user preferences by modeling historical behaviors ordered in time. Despite effectiveness, focusing only on the \textit{collaborative signals} from behaviors does not fully grasp user interests. It is also significant to model the \textit{semantic relatedness} reflected in content features, e.g., images and text. Towards that end, in this paper, we aim to enhance the SRS tasks by effectively unifying collaborative signals and semantic relatedness together. Notably, we empirically point out that it is nontrivial to achieve such a goal due to semantic gap issues. Thus, we propose an end-to-end two-stream architecture for sequential recommendation, named TSSR, to learn user preferences from ID-based and content-based sequence. Specifically, we first present novel hierarchical contrasting module, including coarse user-grained and fine item-grained terms, to align the representations of inter-modality. Furthermore, we also design a two-stream architecture to learn the dependence of intra-modality sequence and the complex interactions of inter-modality sequence, which can yield more expressive capacity in understanding user interests. We conduct extensive experiments on five public datasets. The experimental results show that the TSSR could yield superior performance than competitive baselines. We also make our experimental codes publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TSSR-2A27/.

Professional Agents -- Evolving Large Language Models into Autonomous Experts with Human-Level Competencies

The advent of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, PaLM, and GPT-4 has catalyzed remarkable advances in natural language processing, demonstrating human-like language fluency and reasoning capacities. This position paper introduces the concept of Professional Agents (PAgents), an application framework harnessing LLM capabilities to create autonomous agents with controllable, specialized, interactive, and professional-level competencies. We posit that PAgents can reshape professional services through continuously developed expertise. Our proposed PAgents framework entails a tri-layered architecture for genesis, evolution, and synergy: a base tool layer, a middle agent layer, and a top synergy layer. This paper aims to spur discourse on promising real-world applications of LLMs. We argue the increasing sophistication and integration of PAgents could lead to AI systems exhibiting professional mastery over complex domains, serving critical needs, and potentially achieving artificial general intelligence.

LLM-Guided Multi-View Hypergraph Learning for Human-Centric Explainable Recommendation

As personalized recommendation systems become vital in the age of information overload, traditional methods relying solely on historical user interactions often fail to fully capture the multifaceted nature of human interests. To enable more human-centric modeling of user preferences, this work proposes a novel explainable recommendation framework, i.e., LLMHG, synergizing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and the structural advantages of hypergraph neural networks. By effectively profiling and interpreting the nuances of individual user interests, our framework pioneers enhancements to recommendation systems with increased explainability. We validate that explicitly accounting for the intricacies of human preferences allows our human-centric and explainable LLMHG approach to consistently outperform conventional models across diverse real-world datasets. The proposed plug-and-play enhancement framework delivers immediate gains in recommendation performance while offering a pathway to apply advanced LLMs for better capturing the complexity of human interests across machine learning applications.

Task-Driven Causal Feature Distillation: Towards Trustworthy Risk Prediction

Since artificial intelligence has seen tremendous recent successes in many areas, it has sparked great interest in its potential for trustworthy and interpretable risk prediction. However, most models lack causal reasoning and struggle with class imbalance, leading to poor precision and recall. To address this, we propose a Task-Driven Causal Feature Distillation model (TDCFD) to transform original feature values into causal feature attributions for the specific risk prediction task. The causal feature attribution helps describe how much contribution the value of this feature can make to the risk prediction result. After the causal feature distillation, a deep neural network is applied to produce trustworthy prediction results with causal interpretability and high precision/recall. We evaluate the performance of our TDCFD method on several synthetic and real datasets, and the results demonstrate its superiority over the state-of-the-art methods regarding precision, recall, interpretability, and causality.

Pixel-to-Abundance Translation: Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks Based on Patch Transformer for Hyperspectral Unmixing

Spectral unmixing is a significant challenge in hyperspectral image processing. Existing unmixing methods utilize prior knowledge about the abundance distribution to solve the regularization optimization problem, where the difficulty lies in choosing appropriate prior knowledge and solving the complex regularization optimization problem. To solve these problems, we propose a hyperspectral conditional generative adversarial network (HyperGAN) method as a generic unmixing framework, based on the following assumption: the unmixing process from pixel to abundance can be regarded as a transformation of two modalities with an internal specific relationship. The proposed HyperGAN is composed of a generator and discriminator, the former completes the modal conversion from mixed hyperspectral pixel patch to the abundance of corresponding endmember of the central pixel and the latter is used to distinguish whether the distribution and structure of generated abundance are the same as the true ones. We propose hyperspectral image (HSI) Patch Transformer as the main component of the generator, which utilize adaptive attention score to capture the internal pixels correlation of the HSI patch and leverage the spatial-spectral information in a fine-grained way to achieve optimization of the unmixing process. Experiments on synthetic data and real hyperspectral data achieve impressive results compared to state-of-the-art competitors.

Enhancing Event Sequence Modeling with Contrastive Relational Inference

Neural temporal point processes(TPPs) have shown promise for modeling continuous-time event sequences. However, capturing the interactions between events is challenging yet critical for performing inference tasks like forecasting on event sequence data. Existing TPP models have focused on parameterizing the conditional distribution of future events but struggle to model event interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages Neural Relational Inference (NRI) to learn a relation graph that infers interactions while simultaneously learning the dynamics patterns from observational data. Our approach, the Contrastive Relational Inference-based Hawkes Process (CRIHP), reasons about event interactions under a variational inference framework. It utilizes intensity-based learning to search for prototype paths to contrast relationship constraints. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in capturing event interactions for event sequence modeling tasks.

Learning from Negative User Feedback and Measuring Responsiveness for Sequential Recommenders

Sequential recommenders have been widely used in industry due to their strength in modeling user preferences. While these models excel at learning a user's positive interests, less attention has been paid to learning from negative user feedback. Negative user feedback is an important lever of user control, and comes with an expectation that recommenders should respond quickly and reduce similar recommendations to the user. However, negative feedback signals are often ignored in the training objective of sequential retrieval models, which primarily aim at predicting positive user interactions. In this work, we incorporate explicit and implicit negative user feedback into the training objective of sequential recommenders in the retrieval stage using a "not-to-recommend" loss function that optimizes for the log-likelihood of not recommending items with negative feedback. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach using live experiments on a large-scale industrial recommender system. Furthermore, we address a challenge in measuring recommender responsiveness to negative feedback by developing a counterfactual simulation framework to compare recommender responses between different user actions, showing improved responsiveness from the modeling change.

Leveraging Large Language Models for Pre-trained Recommender Systems

Recent advancements in recommendation systems have shifted towards more comprehensive and personalized recommendations by utilizing large language models (LLM). However, effectively integrating LLM's commonsense knowledge and reasoning abilities into recommendation systems remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose RecSysLLM, a novel pre-trained recommendation model based on LLMs. RecSysLLM retains LLM reasoning and knowledge while integrating recommendation domain knowledge through unique designs of data, training, and inference. This allows RecSysLLM to leverage LLMs' capabilities for recommendation tasks in an efficient, unified framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RecSysLLM on benchmarks and real-world scenarios. RecSysLLM provides a promising approach to developing unified recommendation systems by fully exploiting the power of pre-trained language models.