Deming Ding, Shichun Liu, Enhui Yang, Jiahang Lin, Ziying Chen, Shihan Dou, Honglin Guo, Weiyu Cheng, Pengyu Zhao, Chengjun Xiao, Qunhong Zeng, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Qidi Xu, Tao Gui. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Prediction over tabular data is often a crucial task in many real-life applications. Recent advances in deep learning give rise to various deep models for tabular data prediction. A common and essential step in these models is to vectorize raw input features in tabular data into dense embeddings. Choosing a suitable dimension for each feature is challenging yet necessary to improve model’s performance and reduce memory cost of model parameters. Existing solutions to embedding dimensionality search always choose dimensions from a restricted candidate set. This restriction improves the search efficiency but would produce suboptimal embedding dimensions that hurt model’s predictive performance. In this paper, we develop AutoSrh, a flexible embedding dimensionality search framework that can select varying dimensions for different features through differentiable optimization. The key idea of AutoSrh is to relax the search space to be continuous and optimize the selection of embedding dimensions via gradient descent. After optimization, AutoSrh performs embedding pruning to derive the mixed embedding dimensions and retrains the model to further improve the performance. Extensive experiments on five real-world tabular datasets demonstrate that AutoSrh can achieve better predictive performance than the existing approaches with 1.1$\sim$1.6x lower training time cost and reserve model’s predictive performance while reducing 50$\sim$95% embedding parameters.

Click-through Rate (CTR) prediction on cold users is a challenging task in recommender systems. Recent researches have resorted to meta-learning to tackle the cold-user challenge, which either perform few-shot user representation learning or adopt optimization-based meta-learning. However, existing methods suffer from information loss or inefficient optimization process, and they fail to explicitly model global user preference knowledge, which is crucial to complement the sparse and insufficient preference information of cold users. In this article, we propose a novel and efficient approach named RESUS, which decouples the learning of global preference knowledge contributed by collective users from the learning of residual preferences for individual users. Specifically, we employ a shared predictor to infer basis user preferences, which acquires global preference knowledge from the interactions of different users. Meanwhile, we develop two efficient algorithms based on the nearest neighbor and ridge regression predictors, which infer residual user preferences via learning quickly from a few user-specific interactions. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our RESUS approach is efficient and effective in improving CTR prediction accuracy on cold users, compared with various state-of-the-art methods.

Among various recommendation methods, latent factor models are usually considered to be state-of-the-art techniques, which aim to learn user and item embeddings for predicting user-item preferences. When applying latent factor models to the recommendation with implicit feedback, the quality of embeddings always suffers from inadequate positive feedback and noisy negative feedback. Inspired by the idea of NSVD that represents users based on their interacted items, this article proposes a dual-embedding based deep latent factor method for recommendation with implicit feedback. In addition to learning a primitive embedding for a user (resp. item), we represent each user (resp. item) with an additional embedding from the perspective of the interacted items (resp. users) and propose attentive neural methods to discriminate the importance of interacted users/items for dual-embedding learning. We design two dual-embedding based deep latent factor models, DELF and DESEQ, for pure collaborative filtering and temporal collaborative filtering (i.e., sequential recommendation), respectively. The novel attempt of the proposed models is to capture each user-item interaction with four deep representations that are subtly fused for preference prediction. We conducted extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The results verify the effectiveness of user/item dual embeddings and the superior performance of our methods on item recommendation.

Various factorization-based methods have been proposed to leverage second-order, or higher-order cross features for boosting the performance of predictive models. They generally enumerate all the cross features under a predefined maximum order, and then identify useful feature interactions through model training, which suffer from two drawbacks. First, they have to make a trade-off between the expressiveness of higher-order cross features and the computational cost, resulting in suboptimal predictions. Second, enumerating all the cross features, including irrelevant ones, may introduce noisy feature combinations that degrade model performance. In this work, we propose the Adaptive Factorization Network (AFN), a new model that learns arbitrary-order cross features adaptively from data. The core of AFN is a logarithmic transformation layer that converts the power of each feature in a feature combination into the coefficient to be learned. The experimental results on four real datasets demonstrate the superior predictive performance of AFN against the state-of-the-arts.

This paper focuses on the practical problem of detecting taxi anomalous detours. In this paper, we propose a length-adaptive detection approach called LADD to detect if a taxi conducted an anomalous detour by investigating the taxi journey's trajectory. We employ a similarity-based detection strategy, which takes trajectory length into consideration. Our approach can deal with both long and short trajectories by applying weighted similarity on trajectories and using trajectory concatenation or clipping. For quantitative performance comparison, we propose a performance metric, and compare our approach with the state-of-the-art methods on a real-world dataset. The results verify the superior performance of LADD on taxi detour detection.

Latent factor models (LFMs) such as matrix factorization have achieved the state-of-the-art performance among various collaborative filtering approaches for recommendation. Despite the high recommendation accuracy of LFMs, a critical issue to be resolved is their lack of interpretability. Extensive efforts have been devoted to interpreting the prediction results of LFMs. However, they either rely on auxiliary information which may not be available in practice, or sacrifice recommendation accuracy for interpretability. Influence functions, stemming from robust statistics, have been developed to understand the effect of training points on the predictions of black-box models. Inspired by this, we propose a novel explanation method named FIA (Fast Influence Analysis) to understand the prediction of trained LFMs by tracing back to the training data with influence functions. We present how to employ influence functions to measure the impact of historical user-item interactions on the prediction results of LFMs and provide intuitive neighbor-style explanations based on the most influential interactions. Our proposed FIA exploits the characteristics of two important LFMs, matrix factorization and neural collaborative filtering, and is capable of accelerating the overall influence analysis process. We provide a detailed complexity analysis for FIA over LFMs and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its performance using real-world datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of FIA, and the usefulness of the generated explanations for the recommendation results.

Urban air pollution has attracted much attention these years for its adverse impacts on human health. While monitoring stations have been established to collect pollutant statistics, the number of stations is very limited due to the high cost. Thus, inferring fine-grained urban air quality information is becoming an essential issue for both government and people. In this paper, we propose a generic neural approach, named ADAIN, for urban air quality inference. We leverage both the information from monitoring stations and urban data that are closely related to air quality, including POIs, road networks and meteorology. ADAIN combines feedforward and recurrent neural networks for modeling static and sequential features as well as capturing deep feature interactions effectively. A novel attempt of ADAIN is an attention-based pooling layer that automatically learns the weights of features from different monitoring stations, to boost the performance. We conduct experiments on a real-world air quality dataset and our approach achieves the highest performance compared with various state-of-the-art solutions.

Among various recommendation methods, latent factor models are usually considered to be state-of-the-art techniques, which aim to learn user and item embeddings for predicting user-item preferences. When applying latent factor models to recommendation with implicit feedback, the quality of embeddings always suffers from inadequate positive feedback and noisy negative feedback. Inspired by the idea of NSVD that represents users based on their interacted items, this paper proposes a dual-embedding based deep latent factor model named DELF for recommendation with implicit feedback. In addition to learning a single embedding for a user (resp. item), we represent each user (resp. item) with an additional embedding from the perspective of the interacted items (resp. users). We employ an attentive neural method to discriminate the importance of interacted users/items for dual-embedding learning. We further introduce a neural network architecture to incorporate dual embeddings for recommendation. A novel attempt of DELF is to model each user-item interaction with four deep representations that are subtly fused for preference prediction. We conducted extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The results verify the effectiveness of user/item dual embeddings and the superior performance of DELF on item recommendation.