Reweighting Clicks with Dwell Time in Recommendation

The click behavior is the most widely-used user positive feedback in recommendation. However, simply considering each click equally in training may suffer from clickbaits and title-content mismatching, and thus fail to precisely capture users' real satisfaction on items. Dwell time could be viewed as a high-quality quantitative indicator of user preferences on each click, while existing recommendation models do not fully explore the modeling of dwell time. In this work, we focus on reweighting clicks with dwell time in recommendation. Precisely, we first define a new behavior named valid read, which helps to select high-quality click instances for different users and items via dwell time. Next, we propose a normalized dwell time function to reweight click signals in training, which could better guide our model to provide a high-quality and efficient reading. The Click reweighting model achieves significant improvements on both offline and online evaluations in a real-world system.Comment: 5 pages, under revie

Learning from All Sides: Diversified Positive Augmentation via Self-distillation in Recommendation

Personalized recommendation relies on user historical behaviors to provide user-interested items, and thus seriously struggles with the data sparsity issue. A powerful positive item augmentation is beneficial to address the sparsity issue, while few works could jointly consider both the accuracy and diversity of these augmented training labels. In this work, we propose a novel model-agnostic Diversified self-distillation guided positive augmentation (DivSPA) for accurate and diverse positive item augmentations. Specifically, DivSPA first conducts three types of retrieval strategies to collect high-quality and diverse positive item candidates according to users' overall interests, short-term intentions, and similar users. Next, a self-distillation module is conducted to double-check and rerank these candidates as the final positive augmentations. Extensive offline and online evaluations verify the effectiveness of our proposed DivSPA on both accuracy and diversity. DivSPA is simple and effective, which could be conveniently adapted to other base models and systems. Currently, DivSPA has been deployed on multiple widely-used real-world recommender systems

The clinical significance of mitochondrial calcium uniporter in gastric cancer patients and its preliminary exploration of the impact on mitochondrial function and metabolism

ObjectiveThe objective of this study is to elucidate the influence of MCU on the clinical pathological features of GC patients, to investigate the function and mechanism of the mitochondrial calcium uptake transporter MCU in the initiation and progression of GC, and to explore its impact on the metabolic pathways and biosynthesis of mitochondria. The ultimate goal is to identify novel targets and strategies for the clinical management of GC patients.MethodsTumor and adjacent tissue specimens were obtained from 205 patients with gastric cancer, and immunohistochemical tests were performed to assess the expression of MCU and its correlation with clinical pathological characteristics and prognosis. Data from TCGA, GTEx and GEO databases were retrieved for gastric cancer patients, and bioinformatics analysis was utilized to investigate the association between MCU expression and clinical pathological features. Furthermore, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the role of MCU in GC patients. We investigated the correlation between MCU expression in GC and its impact on mitochondrial function, metabolism, biosynthesis, and immune cells. Additionally, we studied the proteins or molecules that interact with MCUResultsOur research revealed high expression of MCU in the GC tissues. This high expression was associated with poorer T and N staging, and indicated a worse disease-free survival period. MCU expression was positively correlated with mitochondrial function, mitochondrial metabolism, nucleotide, amino acid, and fatty acid synthesis metabolism, and negatively correlated with nicotinate and nicotinamide metabolism. Furthermore, the MCU also regulates the function of the mitochondrial oxidative respiratory chain. The MCU influences the immune cells of GC patients and regulates ROS generation, cell proliferation, apoptosis, and resistance to platinum-based drugs in gastric cancer cells.ConclusionHigh expression of MCU in GC indicates poorer clinical outcomes. The expression of the MCU are affected through impacts the function of mitochondria, energy metabolism, and cellular biosynthesis in gastric cancer cells, thereby influencing the growth and metastasis of gastric cancer cells. Therefore, the mitochondrial changes regulated by MCU could be a new focus for research and treatment of GC

Functional interactions among neurons within single columns of macaque V1.

Recent developments in high-density neurophysiological tools now make it possible to record from hundreds of single neurons within local, highly interconnected neural networks. Among the many advantages of such recordings is that they dramatically increase the quantity of identifiable, functional interactions between neurons thereby providing an unprecedented view of local circuits. Using high-density, Neuropixels recordings from single neocortical columns of primary visual cortex in nonhuman primates, we identified 1000s of functionally interacting neuronal pairs using established crosscorrelation approaches. Our results reveal clear and systematic variations in the synchrony and strength of functional interactions within single cortical columns. Despite neurons residing within the same column, both measures of interactions depended heavily on the vertical distance separating neuronal pairs, as well as on the similarity of stimulus tuning. In addition, we leveraged the statistical power afforded by the large numbers of functionally interacting pairs to categorize interactions between neurons based on their crosscorrelation functions. These analyses identified distinct, putative classes of functional interactions within the full population. These classes of functional interactions were corroborated by their unique distributions across defined laminar compartments and were consistent with known properties of V1 cortical circuitry, such as the lead-lag relationship between simple and complex cells. Our results provide a clear proof-of-principle for the use of high-density neurophysiological recordings to assess circuit-level interactions within local neuronal networks

Pruning Pre-trained Language Models Without Fine-Tuning

To overcome the overparameterized problem in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), pruning is widely used as a simple and straightforward compression method by directly removing unimportant weights. Previous first-order methods successfully compress PLMs to extremely high sparsity with little performance drop. These methods, such as movement pruning, use first-order information to prune PLMs while fine-tuning the remaining weights. In this work, we argue fine-tuning is redundant for first-order pruning, since first-order pruning is sufficient to converge PLMs to downstream tasks without fine-tuning. Under this motivation, we propose Static Model Pruning (SMP), which only uses first-order pruning to adapt PLMs to downstream tasks while achieving the target sparsity level. In addition, we also design a new masking function and training objective to further improve SMP. Extensive experiments at various sparsity levels show SMP has significant improvements over first-order and zero-order methods. Unlike previous first-order methods, SMP is also applicable to low sparsity and outperforms zero-order methods. Meanwhile, SMP is more parameter efficient than other methods due to it does not require fine-tuning.Comment: Accepted to ACL 2023; Code and models are available at https://github.com/kongds/SM

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Integrated Recommendation

Integrated recommendation aims to jointly recommend heterogeneous items in the main feed from different sources via multiple channels, which needs to capture user preferences on both item and channel levels. It has been widely used in practical systems by billions of users, while few works concentrate on the integrated recommendation systematically. In this work, we propose a novel Hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for integrated recommendation (HRL-Rec), which divides the integrated recommendation into two tasks to recommend channels and items sequentially. The low-level agent is a channel selector, which generates a personalized channel list. The high-level agent is an item recommender, which recommends specific items from heterogeneous channels under the channel constraints. We design various rewards for both recommendation accuracy and diversity, and propose four losses for fast and stable model convergence. We also conduct an online exploration for sufficient training. In experiments, we conduct extensive offline and online experiments on a billion-level real-world dataset to show the effectiveness of HRL-Rec. HRL-Rec has also been deployed on WeChat Top Stories, affecting millions of users. The source codes are released in https://github.com/modriczhang/HRL-Rec

Analysis of environmental activities for developing public health investments and policies: A comparative study with structure equation and interval type 2 fuzzy hybrid models

The design of elements which exert pivotal effects on leisurely physical activity (LPA) in open space is an important part of urban development. However, little research has been done about the influence and discrepancies of those elements in different types of open space. To research these issues and to guide the design of urban open space, a survey from 8 open spaces (2 curtilage, 2 neighborhood squares (NS), 2 parks, and 2 campus) is conducted and a questionnaire is administered. Simultaneous analysis of several groups (SASG) of Structure equation model (SEM) is used, and the effects and discrepancies are acquired. In addition to this situation, interval type 2 (IT2) fuzzy hybrid decision making model is proposed in the second analysis. In this framework, IT2 fuzzy decision-making trial, evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), and IT2 fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods are used. The results show that the influence relationships between elements and LPA did exist in four groups. Another important conclusion is that there were discrepancies of influence among different space groups. Physical environment (PE) has the greatest influence on LPA in the curtilage, whereas facilities exert the most effect in NS group. Additionally, amenities only have significant impact in parks and facilities only exercise remarkable influence on duration on campus. In addition to them, it is also identified that key design elements are presented for different types of space and that design strategy is provided through 4 specific examples.Soft Science Research Projects of Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development(MOHURD) of People's Republic of China: Research on renovation design of outdoor sports space suitable for older adults in the old communities of cold region Planning Project of Heilongjiang Province Art and Science: Research on the development of industrial heritage art district in Harbi

Haplotype-resolved Genome of Sika Deer Reveals Allele-specific Gene Expression and Chromosome Evolution

Despite the scientific and medicinal importance of diploid sika deer (Cervus nippon), its genome resources are limited and haplotype-resolved chromosome-scale assembly is urgently needed. To explore mechanisms underlying the expression patterns of the allele-specific genes in antlers and the chromosome evolution in Cervidae, we report, for the first time, a high-quality haplotype-resolved chromosome-scale genome of sika deer by integrating multiple sequencing strategies, which was anchored to 32 homologous groups with a pair of sex chromosomes (XY). Several expanded genes (RET, PPP2R1A, PPP2R1B, YWHAB, YWHAZ, and RPS6) and positively selected genes (eIF4E, Wnt8A, Wnt9B, BMP4, and TP53) were identified, which could contribute to rapid antler growth without carcinogenesis. A comprehensive and systematic genome-wide analysis of allele expression patterns revealed that most alleles were functionally equivalent in regulating rapid antler growth and inhibiting oncogenesis. Comparative genomic analysis revealed that chromosome fission might occur during the divergence of sika deer and red deer (Cervus elaphus), and the olfactory sensation of sika deer might be more powerful than that of red deer. Obvious inversion regions containing olfactory receptor genes were also identified, which arose since the divergence. In conclusion, the high-quality allele-aware reference genome provides valuable resources for further illustration of the unique biological characteristics of antler, chromosome evolution, and multi-omics research of cervid animals

Metagenomic next-generation sequencing of plasma cell-free DNA improves the early diagnosis of suspected infections

Abstract Background Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) could improve the diagnosed efficiency of pathogens in bloodstream infections or sepsis. Little is known about the clinical impact of mNGS test when used for the early diagnosis of suspected infections. Herein, our main objective was to assess the clinical efficacy of utilizing blood samples to perform mNGS for early diagnosis of suspected infections, as well as to evaluate its potential in guiding antimicrobial therapy decisions. Methods In this study, 212 adult hospitalized patients who underwent blood mNGS test in the early stage of suspected infections were enrolled. Diagnostic efficacy of mNGS test and blood culture was compared, and the clinical impact of mNGS on clinical care was analyzed. Results In our study, the total detection rate of blood mNGS was significantly higher than that of culture method (74.4% vs. 12.1%, P < 0.001) in the paired mNGS test and blood culture. Blood stream infection (107, 67.3%) comprised the largest component of all the diseases in our patients, and the detection rate of single blood sample subgroup was similar with that of multiple type of samples subgroup. Among the 187 patients complained with fever, there was no difference in the diagnostic efficacy of mNGS when blood specimens or additional other specimens were used in cases presenting only with fever. While, when patients had other symptoms except fever, the performance of mNGS was superior in cases with specimens of suspected infected sites and blood collected at the same time. Guided by mNGS results, therapeutic regimens for 70.3% cases (149/212) were changed, and the average hospitalized days were significantly shortened in cases with the earlier sampling time of admission. Conclusion In this study, we emphasized the importance of blood mNGS in early infectious patients with mild and non-specific symptoms. Blood mNGS can be used as a supplement to conventional laboratory examination, and should be performed as soon as possible to guide clinicians to perform appropriate anti-infection treatment timely and effectively. Additionally, combining the contemporaneous samples from suspected infection sites could improve disease diagnosis and prognoses. Further research needs to be better validated in large-scale clinical trials to optimize diagnostic protocol, and the cost-utility analysis should be performed