421 research outputs found
Leveraging Large Language Models in Conversational Recommender Systems
A Conversational Recommender System (CRS) offers increased transparency and
control to users by enabling them to engage with the system through a real-time
multi-turn dialogue. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an
unprecedented ability to converse naturally and incorporate world knowledge and
common-sense reasoning into language understanding, unlocking the potential of
this paradigm. However, effectively leveraging LLMs within a CRS introduces new
technical challenges, including properly understanding and controlling a
complex conversation and retrieving from external sources of information. These
issues are exacerbated by a large, evolving item corpus and a lack of
conversational data for training. In this paper, we provide a roadmap for
building an end-to-end large-scale CRS using LLMs. In particular, we propose
new implementations for user preference understanding, flexible dialogue
management and explainable recommendations as part of an integrated
architecture powered by LLMs. For improved personalization, we describe how an
LLM can consume interpretable natural language user profiles and use them to
modulate session-level context. To overcome conversational data limitations in
the absence of an existing production CRS, we propose techniques for building a
controllable LLM-based user simulator to generate synthetic conversations. As a
proof of concept we introduce RecLLM, a large-scale CRS for YouTube videos
built on LaMDA, and demonstrate its fluency and diverse functionality through
some illustrative example conversations
Reward Shaping for User Satisfaction in a REINFORCE Recommender
How might we design Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based recommenders that
encourage aligning user trajectories with the underlying user satisfaction?
Three research questions are key: (1) measuring user satisfaction, (2)
combatting sparsity of satisfaction signals, and (3) adapting the training of
the recommender agent to maximize satisfaction. For measurement, it has been
found that surveys explicitly asking users to rate their experience with
consumed items can provide valuable orthogonal information to the
engagement/interaction data, acting as a proxy to the underlying user
satisfaction. For sparsity, i.e, only being able to observe how satisfied users
are with a tiny fraction of user-item interactions, imputation models can be
useful in predicting satisfaction level for all items users have consumed. For
learning satisfying recommender policies, we postulate that reward shaping in
RL recommender agents is powerful for driving satisfying user experiences.
Putting everything together, we propose to jointly learn a policy network and a
satisfaction imputation network: The role of the imputation network is to learn
which actions are satisfying to the user; while the policy network, built on
top of REINFORCE, decides which items to recommend, with the reward utilizing
the imputed satisfaction. We use both offline analysis and live experiments in
an industrial large-scale recommendation platform to demonstrate the promise of
our approach for satisfying user experiences.Comment: Accepted in Reinforcement Learning for Real Life (RL4RealLife)
Workshop in the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning, 202
A Deep Prediction Network for Understanding Advertiser Intent and Satisfaction
For e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Amazon, advertisers play an
important role in the entire digital ecosystem: their behaviors explicitly
influence users' browsing and shopping experience; more importantly,
advertiser's expenditure on advertising constitutes a primary source of
platform revenue. Therefore, providing better services for advertisers is
essential for the long-term prosperity for e-commerce platforms. To achieve
this goal, the ad platform needs to have an in-depth understanding of
advertisers in terms of both their marketing intents and satisfaction over the
advertising performance, based on which further optimization could be carried
out to service the advertisers in the correct direction. In this paper, we
propose a novel Deep Satisfaction Prediction Network (DSPN), which models
advertiser intent and satisfaction simultaneously. It employs a two-stage
network structure where advertiser intent vector and satisfaction are jointly
learned by considering the features of advertiser's action information and
advertising performance indicators. Experiments on an Alibaba advertisement
dataset and online evaluations show that our proposed DSPN outperforms
state-of-the-art baselines and has stable performance in terms of AUC in the
online environment. Further analyses show that DSPN not only predicts
advertisers' satisfaction accurately but also learns an explainable advertiser
intent, revealing the opportunities to optimize the advertising performance
further
Latent User Intent Modeling for Sequential Recommenders
Sequential recommender models are essential components of modern industrial
recommender systems. These models learn to predict the next items a user is
likely to interact with based on his/her interaction history on the platform.
Most sequential recommenders however lack a higher-level understanding of user
intents, which often drive user behaviors online. Intent modeling is thus
critical for understanding users and optimizing long-term user experience. We
propose a probabilistic modeling approach and formulate user intent as latent
variables, which are inferred based on user behavior signals using variational
autoencoders (VAE). The recommendation policy is then adjusted accordingly
given the inferred user intent. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the latent
user intent modeling via offline analyses as well as live experiments on a
large-scale industrial recommendation platform.Comment: The Web Conference 2023, Industry Trac
A machine learning personalization flow
This thesis describes a machine learning-based personalization flow for streaming platforms: we match users and content like video or music, and monitor the results. We find that there are still many open questions in personalization and especially in recommendation. When recommending an item to a user, how do we use unobservable data, e.g., intent, user and content metadata as input? Can we optimize directly for non-differentiable metrics? What about diversity in recommendations? To answer these questions, this thesis proposes data, experimental design, loss functions, and metrics. In the future, we hope these concepts are brought closer together via end-to-end solutions, where personalization models are directly optimized for the desired metric
XAIR: A Framework of Explainable AI in Augmented Reality
Explainable AI (XAI) has established itself as an important component of
AI-driven interactive systems. With Augmented Reality (AR) becoming more
integrated in daily lives, the role of XAI also becomes essential in AR because
end-users will frequently interact with intelligent services. However, it is
unclear how to design effective XAI experiences for AR. We propose XAIR, a
design framework that addresses "when", "what", and "how" to provide
explanations of AI output in AR. The framework was based on a
multi-disciplinary literature review of XAI and HCI research, a large-scale
survey probing 500+ end-users' preferences for AR-based explanations, and three
workshops with 12 experts collecting their insights about XAI design in AR.
XAIR's utility and effectiveness was verified via a study with 10 designers and
another study with 12 end-users. XAIR can provide guidelines for designers,
inspiring them to identify new design opportunities and achieve effective XAI
designs in AR.Comment: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
System
Folk Theories, Recommender Systems, and Human-Centered Explainable Artificial Intelligence (HCXAI)
This study uses folk theories to enhance human-centered “explainable AI” (HCXAI). The complexity and opacity of machine learning has compelled the need for explainability. Consumer services like Amazon, Facebook, TikTok, and Spotify have resulted in machine learning becoming ubiquitous in the everyday lives of the non-expert, lay public. The following research questions inform this study: What are the folk theories of users that explain how a recommender system works? Is there a relationship between the folk theories of users and the principles of HCXAI that would facilitate the development of more transparent and explainable recommender systems? Using the Spotify music recommendation system as an example, 19 Spotify users were surveyed and interviewed to elicit their folk theories of how personalized recommendations work in a machine learning system. Seven folk theories emerged: complies, dialogues, decides, surveils, withholds and conceals, empathizes, and exploits. These folk theories support, challenge, and augment the principles of HCXAI. Taken collectively, the folk theories encourage HCXAI to take a broader view of XAI. The objective of HCXAI is to move towards a more user-centered, less technically focused XAI. The elicited folk theories indicate that this will require adopting principles that include policy implications, consumer protection issues, and concerns about intention and the possibility of manipulation. As a window into the complex user beliefs that inform their iii interactions with Spotify, the folk theories offer insights into how HCXAI systems can more effectively provide machine learning explainability to the non-expert, lay public
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