Harnessing Multimodal Large Language Models for Multimodal Sequential Recommendation

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in the field of Recommendation Systems (RSs). Most existing studies have focused on converting user behavior logs into textual prompts and leveraging techniques such as prompt tuning to enable LLMs for recommendation tasks. Meanwhile, research interest has recently grown in multimodal recommendation systems that integrate data from images, text, and other sources using modality fusion techniques. This introduces new challenges to the existing LLM-based recommendation paradigm which relies solely on text modality information. Moreover, although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capable of processing multi-modal inputs have emerged, how to equip MLLMs with multi-modal recommendation capabilities remains largely unexplored. To this end, in this paper, we propose the Multimodal Large Language Model-enhanced Multimodaln Sequential Recommendation (MLLM-MSR) model. To capture the dynamic user preference, we design a two-stage user preference summarization method. Specifically, we first utilize an MLLM-based item-summarizer to extract image feature given an item and convert the image into text. Then, we employ a recurrent user preference summarization generation paradigm to capture the dynamic changes in user preferences based on an LLM-based user-summarizer. Finally, to enable the MLLM for multi-modal recommendation task, we propose to fine-tune a MLLM-based recommender using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) techniques. Extensive evaluations across various datasets validate the effectiveness of MLLM-MSR, showcasing its superior ability to capture and adapt to the evolving dynamics of user preferences.

PAIL: Performance based Adversarial Imitation Learning Engine for Carbon Neutral Optimization

Achieving carbon neutrality within industrial operations has become increasingly imperative for sustainable development. It is both a significant challenge and a key opportunity for operational optimization in industry 4.0. In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based methods offer promising enhancements for sequential optimization processes and can be used for reducing carbon emissions. However, existing DRL methods need a pre-defined reward function to assess the impact of each action on the final sustainable development goals (SDG). In many real applications, such a reward function cannot be given in advance. To address the problem, this study proposes a Performance based Adversarial Imitation Learning (PAIL) engine. It is a novel method to acquire optimal operational policies for carbon neutrality without any pre-defined action rewards. Specifically, PAIL employs a Transformer-based policy generator to encode historical information and predict following actions within a multi-dimensional space. The entire action sequence will be iteratively updated by an environmental simulator. Then PAIL uses a discriminator to minimize the discrepancy between generated sequences and real-world samples of high SDG. In parallel, a Q-learning framework based performance estimator is designed to estimate the impact of each action on SDG. Based on these estimations, PAIL refines generated policies with the rewards from both discriminator and performance estimator. PAIL is evaluated on multiple real-world application cases and datasets. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of PAIL comparing to other state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, PAIL offers meaningful interpretability for the optimization in carbon neutrality.

Cognitive Evolutionary Learning to Select Feature Interactions for Recommender Systems

Feature interaction selection is a fundamental problem in commercial recommender systems. Most approaches equally enumerate all features and interactions by the same pre-defined operation under expert guidance. Their recommendation is unsatisfactory sometimes due to the following issues: (1)~They cannot ensure the learning abilities of models because their architectures are poorly adaptable to tasks and data; (2)~Useless features and interactions can bring unnecessary noise and complicate the training process. In this paper, we aim to adaptively evolve the model to select appropriate operations, features, and interactions under task guidance. Inspired by the evolution and functioning of natural organisms, we propose a novel \textsl{Cognitive EvoLutionary Learning (CELL)} framework, where cognitive ability refers to a property of organisms that allows them to react and survive in diverse environments. It consists of three stages, i.e., DNA search, genome search, and model functioning. Specifically, if we regard the relationship between models and tasks as the relationship between organisms and natural environments, interactions of feature pairs can be analogous to double-stranded DNA, of which relevant features and interactions can be analogous to genomes. Along this line, we diagnose the fitness of the model on operations, features, and interactions to simulate the survival rates of organisms for natural selection. We show that CELL can adaptively evolve into different models for different tasks and data, which enables practitioners to access off-the-shelf models. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that CELL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Also, we conduct synthetic experiments to ascertain that CELL can consistently discover the pre-defined interaction patterns for feature pairs.

FREE: The Foundational Semantic Recognition for Modeling Environmental Ecosystems

Modeling environmental ecosystems is critical for the sustainability of our planet, but is extremely challenging due to the complex underlying processes driven by interactions amongst a large number of physical variables. As many variables are difficult to measure at large scales, existing works often utilize a combination of observable features and locally available measurements or modeled values as input to build models for a specific study region and time period. This raises a fundamental question in advancing the modeling of environmental ecosystems: how to build a general framework for modeling the complex relationships amongst various environmental data over space and time? In this paper, we introduce a new framework, FREE, which maps available environmental data into a text space and then converts the traditional predictive modeling task in environmental science to the semantic recognition problem. The proposed FREE framework leverages recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) to supplement the original input features with natural language descriptions. This facilitates capturing the data semantics and also allows harnessing the irregularities of input features. When used for long-term prediction, FREE has the flexibility to incorporate newly collected observations to enhance future prediction. The efficacy of FREE is evaluated in the context of two societally important real-world applications, predicting stream water temperature in the Delaware River Basin and predicting annual corn yield in Illinois and Iowa. Beyond the superior predictive performance over multiple baseline methods, FREE is shown to be more data- and computation-efficient as it can be pre-trained on simulated data generated by physics-based models.

Untargeted Attack against Federated Recommendation Systems via Poisonous Item Embeddings and the Defense

Federated recommendation (FedRec) can train personalized recommenders without collecting user data, but the decentralized nature makes it susceptible to poisoning attacks. Most previous studies focus on the targeted attack to promote certain items, while the untargeted attack that aims to degrade the overall performance of the FedRec system remains less explored. In fact, untargeted attacks can disrupt the user experience and bring severe financial loss to the service provider. However, existing untargeted attack methods are either inapplicable or ineffective against FedRec systems. In this paper, we delve into the untargeted attack and its defense for FedRec systems. (i) We propose ClusterAttack, a novel untargeted attack method. It uploads poisonous gradients that converge the item embeddings into several dense clusters, which make the recommender generate similar scores for these items in the same cluster and perturb the ranking order. (ii) We propose a uniformity-based defense mechanism (UNION) to protect FedRec systems from such attacks. We design a contrastive learning task that regularizes the item embeddings toward a uniform distribution. Then the server filters out these malicious gradients by estimating the uniformity of updated item embeddings. Experiments on two public datasets show that ClusterAttack can effectively degrade the performance of FedRec systems while circumventing many defense methods, and UNION can improve the resistance of the system against various untargeted attacks, including our ClusterAttack.

XCrossNet: Feature Structure-Oriented Learning for Click-Through Rate Prediction

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is a core task in nowadays commercial recommender systems. Feature crossing, as the mainline of research on CTR prediction, has shown a promising way to enhance predictive performance. Even though various models are able to learn feature interactions without manual feature engineering, they rarely attempt to individually learn representations for different feature structures. In particular, they mainly focus on the modeling of cross sparse features but neglect to specifically represent cross dense features. Motivated by this, we propose a novel Extreme Cross Network, abbreviated XCrossNet, which aims at learning dense and sparse feature interactions in an explicit manner. XCrossNet as a feature structure-oriented model leads to a more expressive representation and a more precise CTR prediction, which is not only explicit and interpretable, but also time-efficient and easy to implement. Experimental studies on Criteo Kaggle dataset show significant improvement of XCrossNet over state-of-the-art models on both effectiveness and efficiency.

Deep Technology Tracing for High-tech Companies

Technological change and innovation are vitally important, especially for high-tech companies. However, factors influencing their future research and development (R&D) trends are both complicated and various, leading it a quite difficult task to make technology tracing for high-tech companies. To this end, in this paper, we develop a novel data-driven solution, i.e., Deep Technology Forecasting (DTF) framework, to automatically find the most possible technology directions customized to each high-tech company. Specially, DTF consists of three components: Potential Competitor Recognition (PCR), Collaborative Technology Recognition (CTR), and Deep Technology Tracing (DTT) neural network. For one thing, PCR and CTR aim to capture competitive relations among enterprises and collaborative relations among technologies, respectively. For another, DTT is designed for modeling dynamic interactions between companies and technologies with the above relations involved. Finally, we evaluate our DTF framework on real-world patent data, and the experimental results clearly prove that DTF can precisely help to prospect future technology emphasis of companies by exploiting hybrid factors.

Long-term Joint Scheduling for Urban Traffic

Recently, the traffic congestion in modern cities has become a growing worry for the residents. As presented in Baidu traffic report, the commuting stress index has reached surprising 1.973 in Beijing during rush hours, which results in longer trip time and increased vehicular queueing. Previous works have demonstrated that by reasonable scheduling, e.g, rebalancing bike-sharing systems and optimized bus transportation, the traffic efficiency could be significantly improved with little resource consumption. However, there are still two disadvantages that restrict their performance: (1) they only consider single scheduling in a short time, but ignoring the layout after first reposition, and (2) they only focus on the single transport. However, the multi-modal characteristics of urban public transportation are largely under-exploited. In this paper, we propose an efficient and economical multi-modal traffic scheduling scheme named JLRLS based on spatio -temporal prediction, which adopts reinforcement learning to obtain optimal long-term and joint schedule. In JLRLS, we combines multiple transportation to conduct scheduling by their own characteristics, which potentially helps the system to reach the optimal performance. Our implementation of an example by PaddlePaddle is available at https://github.com/bigdata-ustc/Long-term-Joint-Scheduling, with an explaining video at https://youtu.be/t5M2wVPhTyk.