Utilizing market forecasts is pivotal in optimizing portfolio selection strategies. We introduce DeepClair, a novel framework for portfolio selection. DeepClair leverages a transformer-based time-series forecasting model to predict market trends, facilitating more informed and adaptable portfolio decisions. To integrate the forecasting model into a deep reinforcement learning-driven portfolio selection framework, we introduced a two-step strategy: first, pre-training the time-series model on market data, followed by fine-tuning the portfolio selection architecture using this model. Additionally, we investigated the optimization technique, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), to enhance the pre-trained forecasting model for fine-tuning in investment scenarios. This work bridges market forecasting and portfolio selection, facilitating the advancement of investment strategies.

We propose a computational approach for recipe ideation, a downstream task that helps users select and gather ingredients for creating dishes. To perform this task, we developed RecipeMind, a food affinity score prediction model that quantifies the suitability of adding an ingredient to set of other ingredients. We constructed a large-scale dataset containing ingredient co-occurrence based scores to train and evaluate RecipeMind on food affinity score prediction. Deployed in recipe ideation, RecipeMind helps the user expand an initial set of ingredients by suggesting additional ingredients. Experiments and qualitative analysis show RecipeMind's potential in fulfilling its assistive role in cuisine domain.

With online calendar services gaining popularity worldwide, calendar data has become one of the richest context sources for understanding human behavior. However, event scheduling is still time-consuming even with the development of online calendars. Although machine learning based event scheduling models have automated scheduling processes to some extent, they often fail to understand subtle user preferences and complex calendar contexts with event titles written in natural language. In this paper, we propose Neural Event Scheduling Assistant (NESA) which learns user preferences and understands calendar contexts, directly from raw online calendars for fully automated and highly effective event scheduling. We leverage over 593K calendar events for NESA to learn scheduling personal events, and we further utilize NESA for multi-attendee event scheduling. NESA successfully incorporates deep neural networks such as Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory, Convolutional Neural Network, and Highway Network for learning the preferences of each user and understanding calendar context based on natural languages. The experimental results show that NESA significantly outperforms previous baseline models in terms of various evaluation metrics on both personal and multi-attendee event scheduling tasks. Our qualitative analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of each layer in NESA and learned user preferences.