Infer Implicit Contexts in Real-time Online-to-Offline Recommendation

Understanding users' context is essential for successful recommendations, especially for Online-to-Offline (O2O) recommendation, such as Yelp, Groupon, and Koubei. Different from traditional recommendation where individual preference is mostly static, O2O recommendation should be dynamic to capture variation of users' purposes across time and location. However, precisely inferring users' real-time contexts information, especially those implicit ones, is extremely difficult, and it is a central challenge for O2O recommendation. In this paper, we propose a new approach, called Mixture Attentional Constrained Denoise AutoEncoder (MACDAE), to infer implicit contexts and consequently, to improve the quality of real-time O2O recommendation. In MACDAE, we first leverage the interaction among users, items, and explicit contexts to infer users' implicit contexts, then combine the learned implicit-context representation into an end-to-end model to make the recommendation. MACDAE works quite well in the real system. We conducted both offline and online evaluations of the proposed approach. Experiments on several real-world datasets (Yelp, Dianping, and Koubei) show our approach could achieve significant improvements over state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, online A/B test suggests a 2.9% increase for click-through rate and 5.6% improvement for conversion rate in real-world traffic. Our model has been deployed in the product of "Guess You Like" recommendation in Koubei.Comment: 9 pages,KDD,KDD201

Enhancing VAEs for Collaborative Filtering: Flexible Priors & Gating Mechanisms

학위논문(석사)--서울대학교 대학원 :융합과학기술대학원 융합과학부(디지털정보융합전공),2019. 8. 서봉원.Since Matrix Factorization based linear models have been dominant in the Collaborative Filtering context for a long time in the past, Neural Network based CF Models for recommendation have started to gain attention recently. One branch of research is based on using deep generative models to model user preferences and Variational Autoencoders where shown to give state-of-the-art results. However, there are some potentially problematic characteristics of the current Variational Autoencoder for CF. The first is the too simplistic prior VAEs incorporate for learning the latent representations of user preference, which may be restricting the model from learning more expressive and richer latent variables that could boost recommendation performance. The other is the models inability to learn deeper representations with more than one hidden layer. Our goal is to incorporate appropriate techniques in order to mitigate the aforementioned problems of Variational Autoencoder CF and further improve the recommendation performance of VAE based Collaborative Fil-tering. We bring the VampPrior, which successfully made improvements for image generation to tackle the restrictive prior problem. We also adopt Gat-ed Linear Units (GLUs) which were used in stacked convolutions for lan-guage modeling to control information flow in the easily deepening auto-encoder framework. We show that such simple priors (in original VAEs) may be too restric-tive to fully model user preferences and setting a more flexible prior gives significant gains. We also show that VAMP priors coupled with gating mechanisms outperform SOTA results including the Variational Autoencoder for Collaborative Filtering by meaningful margins on 4 benchmark datasets (MovieLens, Netflix, Pinterest, Melon).최근 뉴럴넷 기반 협업필터링 추천알고리즘이 주목을 받고 있다. 그 중 한 갈래의 연구는 깊은 생성모형 (Deep Generative Model)을 이용해 사용자들의 선호를 모델링하는 방법이다. 이중 Variational Autoencoder를 (VAE) 이용한 방법이 최근 state-of-the-art (SOTA) 성능을 보여주었다. 그러나 VAE를 이용한 협업필터링 알고리즘은 현재 몇 가지의 잠재적인 문제점들을 지니고 있다. 첫 번째는 사용자 선호를 압축하는 잠재변수를 학습하는 과정에서 매우 단순한 사전분포를 사용한다는 것이다. 또 다른 문제점은 모델이 현재 여러 단을 이용한 깊은 인코더와 디코더를 사용하지 못하고 있다는 것이다. 본 연구는 최신기술들을 활용하여 앞선 문제점들을 해결하고 VAE를 이용한 협업필터링 알고리즘의 추천성능을 더욱 높이는 것이 목표이다. 본 연구는 협업필터링 문제에 더 복잡한 사전분포 (Flexible Prior)를 적용한 첫 연구로서, 기존의 단순한 사전분포가 모델의 표현력을 제한할 수 있으며 더 복잡한 사전분포를 정의함으로써 모델의 성능을 더욱 높일 수 있음을 보였다. 이를 위해 이미지 생성 문제에서 좋은 결과를 보인 VampPrior를 이용해 실험을 진행하였다. 또한 VampPrior를 Gating Mechanisim과 함께 사용하였을 때 기존 SOTA를 넘어서는 성능을 보임을 추천알고리즘에서 사용되는 대표적인 데이터셋들을 통해 보여준다.1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Background and Motivation 1 1.2 Research Goal 3 1.3 Enhancing VAEs for Collaborative Filtering 3 1.4 Experiments 5 1.5 Contributions 5 2 RELATED WORK 7 2.1 Collaborative Filtering 7 2.1.1 Traditional methods & Matrix-Factorization based CF 8 2.1.2 Autoencoders for CF 12 2.2 Deep Generative Models (VAE) 17 2.2.1 Variational Bayes 18 2.2.2 Variational Autoencoder 18 2.3 Variational Autoencoder for Collaborative Filtering 20 2.3.1 VAE for CF 21 2.4 Recent research in Computer Vision & Deep Learning 24 2.4.1 VampPrior 24 2.4.2 Gated CNN 25 3 METHOD 28 3.1 Flexible Prior 29 3.1.1 Motivation 29 3.1.2 VampPrior 30 3.1.3 Hierarchical Stochastic Units 31 3.2 Gating Mechanism 32 3.2.1 Motivation 32 3.2.2 Gated Linear Units 34 4 EXPERIMENT 35 4.1 Setup 35 4.1.1 Baseline Models 35 4.1.2 Proposed Models 37 4.1.3 Strong Generalization 37 4.1.4 Evaluation Metrics 38 4.2 Datasets 38 4.3 Configurations 39 4.4 Results 40 4.4.1 Model Performance 40 4.4.5 Further Analysis on the Effect of Gating 44 5 CONCLUSION 45 Bibliography 47 국문초록 51Maste

Vision-Based Multi-Task Manipulation for Inexpensive Robots Using End-To-End Learning from Demonstration

We propose a technique for multi-task learning from demonstration that trains the controller of a low-cost robotic arm to accomplish several complex picking and placing tasks, as well as non-prehensile manipulation. The controller is a recurrent neural network using raw images as input and generating robot arm trajectories, with the parameters shared across the tasks. The controller also combines VAE-GAN-based reconstruction with autoregressive multimodal action prediction. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to learn complex manipulation tasks, such as picking up a towel, wiping an object, and depositing the towel to its previous position, entirely from raw images with direct behavior cloning. We show that weight sharing and reconstruction-based regularization substantially improve generalization and robustness, and training on multiple tasks simultaneously increases the success rate on all tasks

MetaRec: Meta-Learning Meets Recommendation Systems

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have recently received increasing attention as powerful modeling tools to improve the performance of recommendation systems. Meta-learning, on the other hand, is a paradigm that has re-surged in popularity within the broader machine learning community over the past several years. In this thesis, we will explore the intersection of these two domains and work on developing methods for integrating meta-learning to design more accurate and flexible recommendation systems. In the present work, we propose a meta-learning framework for the design of collaborative filtering methods in recommendation systems, drawing from ideas, models, and solutions from modern approaches in both the meta-learning and recommendation system literature, applying them to recommendation tasks to obtain improved generalization performance. Our proposed framework, MetaRec, includes and unifies the main state-of-the-art models in recommendation systems, extending them to be flexibly configured and efficiently operate with limited data. We empirically test the architectures created under our MetaRec framework on several recommendation benchmark datasets using a plethora of evaluation metrics and find that by taking a meta-learning approach to the collaborative filtering problem, we observe notable gains in predictive performance

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): Challenges, Solutions, and Future Directions

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is a novel class of deep generative models which has recently gained significant attention. GANs learns complex and high-dimensional distributions implicitly over images, audio, and data. However, there exists major challenges in training of GANs, i.e., mode collapse, non-convergence and instability, due to inappropriate design of network architecture, use of objective function and selection of optimization algorithm. Recently, to address these challenges, several solutions for better design and optimization of GANs have been investigated based on techniques of re-engineered network architectures, new objective functions and alternative optimization algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing survey that has particularly focused on broad and systematic developments of these solutions. In this study, we perform a comprehensive survey of the advancements in GANs design and optimization solutions proposed to handle GANs challenges. We first identify key research issues within each design and optimization technique and then propose a new taxonomy to structure solutions by key research issues. In accordance with the taxonomy, we provide a detailed discussion on different GANs variants proposed within each solution and their relationships. Finally, based on the insights gained, we present the promising research directions in this rapidly growing field.Comment: 42 pages, Figure 13, Table

Recommendations for item set completion: On the semantics of item co-occurrence with data sparsity, input size, and input modalities

We address the problem of recommending relevant items to a user in order to "complete" a partial set of items already known. We consider the two scenarios of citation and subject label recommendation, which resemble different semantics of item co-occurrence: relatedness for co-citations and diversity for subject labels. We assess the influence of the completeness of an already known partial item set on the recommender performance. We also investigate data sparsity through a pruning parameter and the influence of using additional metadata. As recommender models, we focus on different autoencoders, which are particularly suited for reconstructing missing items in a set. We extend autoencoders to exploit a multi-modal input of text and structured data. Our experiments on six real-world datasets show that supplying the partial item set as input is helpful when item co-occurrence resembles relatedness, while metadata are effective when co-occurrence implies diversity. This outcome means that the semantics of item co-occurrence is an important factor. The simple item co-occurrence model is a strong baseline for citation recommendation. However, autoencoders have the advantage to enable exploiting additional metadata besides the partial item set as input and achieve comparable performance. For the subject label recommendation task, the title is the most important attribute. Adding more input modalities sometimes even harms the result. In conclusion, it is crucial to consider the semantics of the item co-occurrence for the choice of an appropriate recommendation model and carefully decide which metadata to exploit