Transformers4NewsRec: A Transformer-based News Recommendation Framework

Pre-trained transformer models have shown great promise in various natural language processing tasks, including personalized news recommendations. To harness the power of these models, we introduce Transformers4NewsRec, a new Python framework built on the \textbf{Transformers} library. This framework is designed to unify and compare the performance of various news recommendation models, including deep neural networks and graph-based models. Transformers4NewsRec offers flexibility in terms of model selection, data preprocessing, and evaluation, allowing both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Contrastive Learning of Asset Embeddings from Financial Time Series

Representation learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for extracting valuable latent features from complex, high-dimensional data. In financial domains, learning informative representations for assets can be used for tasks like sector classification, and risk management. However, the complex and stochastic nature of financial markets poses unique challenges. We propose a novel contrastive learning framework to generate asset embeddings from financial time series data. Our approach leverages the similarity of asset returns over many subwindows to generate informative positive and negative samples, using a statistical sampling strategy based on hypothesis testing to address the noisy nature of financial data. We explore various contrastive loss functions that capture the relationships between assets in different ways to learn a discriminative representation space. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the learned asset embeddings on benchmark industry classification and portfolio optimization tasks. In each case our novel approaches significantly outperform existing baselines highlighting the potential for contrastive learning to capture meaningful and actionable relationships in financial data.

Breaking the Barrier: Selective Uncertainty-based Active Learning for Medical Image Segmentation

Active learning (AL) has found wide applications in medical image segmentation, aiming to alleviate the annotation workload and enhance performance. Conventional uncertainty-based AL methods, such as entropy and Bayesian, often rely on an aggregate of all pixel-level metrics. However, in imbalanced settings, these methods tend to neglect the significance of target regions, eg., lesions, and tumors. Moreover, uncertainty-based selection introduces redundancy. These factors lead to unsatisfactory performance, and in many cases, even underperform random sampling. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel approach called the Selective Uncertainty-based AL, avoiding the conventional practice of summing up the metrics of all pixels. Through a filtering process, our strategy prioritizes pixels within target areas and those near decision boundaries. This resolves the aforementioned disregard for target areas and redundancy. Our method showed substantial improvements across five different uncertainty-based methods and two distinct datasets, utilizing fewer labeled data to reach the supervised baseline and consistently achieving the highest overall performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/HelenMa9998/Selective\_Uncertainty\_AL.

RecPrompt: A Prompt Tuning Framework for News Recommendation Using Large Language Models

In the evolving field of personalized news recommendation, understanding the semantics of the underlying data is crucial. Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have shown promising performance in understanding natural language. However, the extent of their applicability in news recommendation systems remains to be validated. This paper introduces RecPrompt, the first framework for news recommendation that leverages the capabilities of LLMs through prompt engineering. This system incorporates a prompt optimizer that applies an iterative bootstrapping process, enhancing the LLM-based recommender's ability to align news content with user preferences and interests more effectively. Moreover, this study offers insights into the effective use of LLMs in news recommendation, emphasizing both the advantages and the challenges of incorporating LLMs into recommendation systems.

Can We Transfer Noise Patterns? A Multi-environment Spectrum Analysis Model Using Generated Cases

Spectrum analysis systems in online water quality testing are designed to detect types and concentrations of pollutants and enable regulatory agencies to respond promptly to pollution incidents. However, spectral data-based testing devices suffer from complex noise patterns when deployed in non-laboratory environments. To make the analysis model applicable to more environments, we propose a noise patterns transferring model, which takes the spectrum of standard water samples in different environments as cases and learns the differences in their noise patterns, thus enabling noise patterns to transfer to unknown samples. Unfortunately, the inevitable sample-level baseline noise makes the model unable to obtain the paired data that only differ in dataset-level environmental noise. To address the problem, we generate a sample-to-sample case-base to exclude the interference of sample-level noise on dataset-level noise learning, enhancing the system's learning performance. Experiments on spectral data with different background noises demonstrate the good noise-transferring ability of the proposed method against baseline systems ranging from wavelet denoising, deep neural networks, and generative models. From this research, we posit that our method can enhance the performance of DL models by generating high-quality cases. The source code is made publicly available online at https://github.com/Magnomic/CNST.

Going Beyond Local: Global Graph-Enhanced Personalized News Recommendations

Precisely recommending candidate news articles to users has always been a core challenge for personalized news recommendation systems. Most recent works primarily focus on using advanced natural language processing techniques to extract semantic information from rich textual data, employing content-based methods derived from local historical news. However, this approach lacks a global perspective, failing to account for users' hidden motivations and behaviors beyond semantic information. To address this challenge, we propose a novel model called GLORY (Global-LOcal news Recommendation sYstem), which combines global representations learned from other users with local representations to enhance personalized recommendation systems. We accomplish this by constructing a Global-aware Historical News Encoder, which includes a global news graph and employs gated graph neural networks to enrich news representations, thereby fusing historical news representations by a historical news aggregator. Similarly, we extend this approach to a Global Candidate News Encoder, utilizing a global entity graph and a candidate news aggregator to enhance candidate news representation. Evaluation results on two public news datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches. Furthermore, our model offers more diverse recommendations.

Topic-Centric Explanations for News Recommendation

News recommender systems (NRS) have been widely applied for online news websites to help users find relevant articles based on their interests. Recent methods have demonstrated considerable success in terms of recommendation performance. However, the lack of explanation for these recommendations can lead to mistrust among users and lack of acceptance of recommendations. To address this issue, we propose a new explainable news model to construct a topic-aware explainable recommendation approach that can both accurately identify relevant articles and explain why they have been recommended, using information from associated topics. Additionally, our model incorporates two coherence metrics applied to assess topic quality, providing measure of the interpretability of these explanations. The results of our experiments on the MIND dataset indicate that the proposed explainable NRS outperforms several other baseline systems, while it is also capable of producing interpretable topics compared to those generated by a classical LDA topic model. Furthermore, we present a case study through a real-world example showcasing the usefulness of our NRS for generating explanations.

Enhancing Topic Extraction in Recommender Systems with Entropy Regularization

In recent years, many recommender systems have utilized textual data for topic extraction to enhance interpretability. However, our findings reveal a noticeable deficiency in the coherence of keywords within topics, resulting in low explainability of the model. This paper introduces a novel approach called entropy regularization to address the issue, leading to more interpretable topics extracted from recommender systems, while ensuring that the performance of the primary task stays competitively strong. The effectiveness of the strategy is validated through experiments on a variation of the probabilistic matrix factorization model that utilizes textual data to extract item embeddings. The experiment results show a significant improvement in topic coherence, which is quantified by cosine similarity on word embeddings.

Learning to Generalize for Cross-domain QA

There have been growing concerns regarding the out-of-domain generalization ability of natural language processing (NLP) models, particularly in question-answering (QA) tasks. Current synthesized data augmentation methods for QA are hampered by increased training costs. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach that combines prompting methods and linear probing then fine-tuning strategy, which does not entail additional cost. Our method has been theoretically and empirically shown to be effective in enhancing the generalization ability of both generative and discriminative models. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with an average increase in F1 score of 4.5%-7.9%. Furthermore, our method can be easily integrated into any pre-trained models and offers a promising solution to the under-explored cross-domain QA task. We release our source code at GitHub*.

Industry Classification Using a Novel Financial Time-Series Case Representation

The financial domain has proven to be a fertile source of challenging machine learning problems across a variety of tasks including prediction, clustering, and classification. Researchers can access an abundance of time-series data and even modest performance improvements can be translated into significant additional value. In this work, we consider the use of case-based reasoning for an important task in this domain, by using historical stock returns time-series data for industry sector classification. We discuss why time-series data can present some significant representational challenges for conventional case-based reasoning approaches, and in response, we propose a novel representation based on stock returns embeddings, which can be readily calculated from raw stock returns data. We argue that this representation is well suited to case-based reasoning and evaluate our approach using a large-scale public dataset for the industry sector classification task, demonstrating substantial performance improvements over several baselines using more conventional representations.