Local Clustering in Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits

We study identifying user clusters in contextual multi-armed bandits (MAB). Contextual MAB is an effective tool for many real applications, such as content recommendation and online advertisement. In practice, user dependency plays an essential role in the user's actions, and thus the rewards. Clustering similar users can improve the quality of reward estimation, which in turn leads to more effective content recommendation and targeted advertising. Different from traditional clustering settings, we cluster users based on the unknown bandit parameters, which will be estimated incrementally. In particular, we define the problem of cluster detection in contextual MAB, and propose a bandit algorithm, LOCB, embedded with local clustering procedure. And, we provide theoretical analysis about LOCB in terms of the correctness and efficiency of clustering and its regret bound. Finally, we evaluate the proposed algorithm from various aspects, which outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: 12 page

Graph Neural Bandits

Contextual bandits algorithms aim to choose the optimal arm with the highest reward out of a set of candidates based on the contextual information. Various bandit algorithms have been applied to real-world applications due to their ability of tackling the exploitation-exploration dilemma. Motivated by online recommendation scenarios, in this paper, we propose a framework named Graph Neural Bandits (GNB) to leverage the collaborative nature among users empowered by graph neural networks (GNNs). Instead of estimating rigid user clusters as in existing works, we model the "fine-grained" collaborative effects through estimated user graphs in terms of exploitation and exploration respectively. Then, to refine the recommendation strategy, we utilize separate GNN-based models on estimated user graphs for exploitation and adaptive exploration. Theoretical analysis and experimental results on multiple real data sets in comparison with state-of-the-art baselines are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.Comment: Accepted to SIGKDD 202

Neural Bandit with Arm Group Graph

Contextual bandits aim to identify among a set of arms the optimal one with the highest reward based on their contextual information. Motivated by the fact that the arms usually exhibit group behaviors and the mutual impacts exist among groups, we introduce a new model, Arm Group Graph (AGG), where the nodes represent the groups of arms and the weighted edges formulate the correlations among groups. To leverage the rich information in AGG, we propose a bandit algorithm, AGG-UCB, where the neural networks are designed to estimate rewards, and we propose to utilize graph neural networks (GNN) to learn the representations of arm groups with correlations. To solve the exploitation-exploration dilemma in bandits, we derive a new upper confidence bound (UCB) built on neural networks (exploitation) for exploration. Furthermore, we prove that AGG-UCB can achieve a near-optimal regret bound with over-parameterized neural networks, and provide the convergence analysis of GNN with fully-connected layers which may be of independent interest. In the end, we conduct extensive experiments against state-of-the-art baselines on multiple public data sets, showing the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.Comment: Accepted to SIGKDD 202

Dynamic Knowledge Graph Alignment

Knowledge graph (KG for short) alignment aims at building a complete KG by linking the shared entities across complementary KGs. Existing approaches assume that KGs are static, despite the fact that almost every KG evolves over time. In this paper, we introduce the task of dynamic knowledge graph alignment, the main challenge of which is how to efficiently update entity embeddings for the evolving graph topology. Our key insight is to view the parameter matrix of GCN as a feature transformation operator and decouple the transformation process from the aggregation process. Based on that, we first propose a novel base algorithm (DINGAL-B) with topology-invariant mask gate and highway gate, which consistently outperforms 14 existing knowledge graph alignment methods in the static setting. More importantly, it naturally leads to two effective and efficient algorithms to align dynamic knowledge graph, including (1) DINGAL-O which leverages previous parameter matrices to update the embeddings of affected entities; and (2) DINGAL-U which resorts to newly obtained anchor links to fine-tune parameter matrices. Compared with their static counterpart (DINGAL-B), DINGAL-U and DINGAL-O are 10× and 100× faster respectively, with little alignment accuracy loss

DISCO: Comprehensive and Explainable Disinformation Detection

Disinformation refers to false information deliberately spread to influence the general public, and the negative impact of disinformation on society can be observed in numerous issues, such as political agendas and manipulating financial markets. In this paper, we identify prevalent challenges and advances related to automated disinformation detection from multiple aspects and propose a comprehensive and explainable disinformation detection framework called DISCO. It leverages the heterogeneity of disinformation and addresses the opaqueness of prediction. Then we provide a demonstration of DISCO on a real-world fake news detection task with satisfactory detection accuracy and explanation. The demo video and source code of DISCO is now publicly available. We expect that our demo could pave the way for addressing the limitations of identification, comprehension, and explainability as a whole