Recommender systems are critical for mitigating information overload, assisting users in uncovering their latent interests, and enhancing their overall experience. Sequential recommendation leverages users' historical interaction sequences to predict dynamic interests more effectively than traditional rec-ommendation approaches. However, existing models-including RNN-based and Transformer-based methods-face significant limitations. RNNs struggle with vanishing gradients and long-term dependency capture, while Transformers, though effective for long-range relationships, suffer from computational inefficiency due to their quadratic attention complexity. Recent advancements have employed contrastive learning for sequential recommendation, aiming to enhance the consistency between augmented views and improve self-supervised learning signals. Despite their promise, these methods often lack diversity in data augmentation strategies, which restricts their capacity for bias mitigation, resulting in augmented data that still retains inherent biases. To address these challenges, we propose MDEC, a novel sequential modeling framework that leverages State Space Models (SSM) combined with unbiased contrastive learning. MDEC utilizes Mamba to efficiently model user preferences as an alternative to Transformer-based models. Additionally, it integrates graph-based information, including item transition and co-interaction data, to improve data augmentation comprehensively. Finally, we introduce adaptive anchor-enhanced contrastive learning, which adaptively utilizes augmented samples to improve representation quality and bias mitigation. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that MDEC significantly out-performs existing models, showcasing improved efficiency, better mitigation of biases, and enhanced recommendation quality. Code is available at https://github.com/Echohuangyan/CSLP.

The goal of Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) is to accurately identify the emotions expressed in each utterance within a dialogue. Despite advancements made by current ERC methods, particularly those using RNN-based and GCN-based models to capture emotional dynamics and model speaker relationships, there remain two primary limitations: first, an insufficient integration of multiple feature representations and commonsense knowledge, which hampers the model's ability for deep emotional understanding; and second, the reliance on a single cross-entropy loss for classification optimization, which restricts the accuracy and robustness of emotion recognition. To address these issues, we propose a method for ERC using Multilayer Feature Fusion and Joint Loss Optimization (MFFJL). This approach combines contextual information, speaker dependency, and commonsense knowledge features by extracting feature vectors through RoBERTa and COMET, utilizing bidirectional LSTM and attention mechanisms to capture conversational context, and applying a cross-fusion module to deeply integrate various features, thus enhancing comprehension of complex emotional expressions. Additionally, the feature classification module incorporates joint cross-entropy and KL divergence optimization, further improving classification accuracy and consistency. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, as evidenced by superior performance on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MFFJL-D9D8.

Multimodal dialogue emotion recognition integrates data from multiple modalities to accurately identify emotional states in conversations. However, differences in expression and information density across modalities complicate the fusion of features. Traditional methods may introduce redundant information from other utterances, reducing the accuracy of emotion recognition. Existing one-hot labels often fail to capture the full range of emotional expressions, leading to biased results. To address these issues, we propose a model that fuses different modalities within the same utterance to avoid redundancy. It employs a progressive classification process, refining emotion recognition from coarse to fine granularity. Additionally, we use emotion polarity probabilities as weights for fine-grained classification and introduce a multimodal information-rich label that considers both the data and their interactions. Experiments on IEMOCAP and MELD datasets demonstrate the model’s effectiveness, significantly improving dialog emotion recognition accuracy. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LOCG-188E.

A significant problem in sequential recommendation (SR) is the over-recommendation of popular items, leading to popularity bias, as users often follow these items due to conformity. Existing methods measure users’ conformity factors to reduce the impact of popularity bias. However, these methods do not consider the differences in users’ conformity behavior in the long-term and short-term. To address this, we propose LSDRec, a novel debiased SR method structured around three key tasks: degree-centrality conformity awareness, dual-scale interest encoding, and adaptive conformity information fusing. The degree-centrality conformity awareness task constructs a multiuser interaction graph, employs a graph convolutional network (GCN) to obtain global user conformity representations, and uses the degree centrality algorithm to compute users’ long-term and short-term conformity factors. The dual-scale interest encoding task models users’ long-term and short-term interests separately, obtaining corresponding interest representations and further enhancing them through the adaptive conformity information fusing task. The adaptive conformity information fusing task contrasts global conformity representations with long-term and short-term interest representations, adaptively integrating conformity factors and dynamically adjusting the degree of conformity information transfer. Together, these three tasks effectively mitigate popularity bias and improve the accuracy of user interest modeling. Our extensive evaluations of four diverse datasets demonstrate LSDRec's superior performance over current state-of-the-art methods.

The objective of sequential recommendation is to predict user preferences for items based on historical interaction sequences. This process often leads to a phenomenon known as popularity bias, where popular items are excessively recommended. Conformity, the tendency of users to follow popular items, is a significant factor contributing to this issue. Previous methods have not adequately disentangled conformity and interest, failing to accurately model users’ true intent. To address this, we propose a novel Disentangled Interest and Conformity Sequential Recommendation method (DICSRec) to mitigate the popularity bias. Specifically, we first design an Intent Encoding Module (IEM), which includes two independent encoders for conformity and interest to model their representations. To better disentangle these two factors, we design a disentangling task with proxy-based self-supervised learning and orthogonal regularization. Furthermore, to provide the Intent Encoding Module with more global information, we design a Global Conformity-aware Module (GCM), which supplies item popularity information and aids in enhancing user conformity representation. Lastly, recognizing the varying significance of user conformity and interest, we propose an adaptive Fusion Prediction Module (FPM) that adaptively aggregates user conformity and interest representations for final prediction. Experiments on four real-world datasets consistently demonstrate the superiority of our method over advanced sequential recommendation models. Code implementation is available at: https://github.com/lyra0611/DICSRec.

Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS), leveraging the temporal information from users' behaviors, have noticeably improved user experience against traditional systems. However, these behaviors often follow long-tail distribution, making the systems biased towards popular items (i.e., popularity bias). Moreover, popularity bias would amplify the neglect of long-tail recommendations, thereby sharpening the long-tail problem. Previous researches usually address these challenges independently, focusing on reducing the over-recommendation of popular items or enhancing the representation quality of tail items. Indeed, it is possible to incorporate their merits to achieve the best of both worlds. Thus, we propose a novel and unified framework, named Collaborative Solution to Long tailed problem and Popularity bias (CSLP), to tackle both the long-tail problem and popularity bias simultaneously. To achieve this, we first introduce a representation enhancement module featuring dual generators to enhance user and item representations, particularly for those in the tail. On the other hand, a debiasing module incorporating an Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) with a clipping strategy is introduced to further alleviate the popularity bias. Specifically, this clipping strategy demonstrates a clear decrease in the original IPS method's variance, effectively improving the recommendation for stability and accuracy. Experiments on three widely-used datasets show CSLP's effectiveness in solving both issues. CSLP surpasses all baselines (traditional, popularity bias, and long-tail problem) in overall performance, significantly enhancing recommendation accuracy for both tail users and items, and achieving a more balanced ratio of recommendations between popular and tail items. Code is available at https://github.com/Echohuangyan/CSLP.

Personalized News Recommendation (PNR) can enhance user experience by alleviating information overload. Traditional news recommendation methods consider all clicking behaviors as user interests, resulting in biased user modeling that fails to accurately capture user interests. In addition, although there are methods to reduce the impact of low-quality news at the representation level by simply filtering it through the attention mechanism. However, this only implicitly models the news in the interaction sequence without specifically considering the quality of each news, and thus has very limited effect in identifying noise. To address these issues, this paper proposes News Recommendation method based on News Quality-aware modeling (NQNR). We attempt to explicitly model the news in the click sequence and candidate ranking one by one to visually assess the quality of each news. Specifically, we design a detection module to detect whether the input news is low-quality news. Then, by reducing the influence of low-quality news in user modeling and candidate ranking, user interests are modeled more accurately, while recommendations of such news are reduced for users. In addition, to capture the similarity of vectors more accurately, we also design a similarity computation method based on the multiple attention mechanism in the detection module. Experiments on a large real-world Microsoft News Dataset (MIND) show that our model significantly outperforms previous models. Our code is posted at the following URL: https://github.com/xxbbjj/NQNR-.

Relation extraction is one of the most essential tasks of knowledge construction, but it depends on a large amount of annotated data corpus. Few-shot relation extraction is proposed as a new paradigm, which is designed to learn new relationships between entities with merely a small number of annotated instances, effectively mitigating the cost of large-scale annotation and long-tail problems. To generalize to novel classes not included in the training set, existing approaches mainly focus on tuning pre-trained language models with relation instructions and developing class prototypes based on metric learning to extract relations. However, the learned representations are extremely sensitive to discrepancies in intra-class and inter-class relationships and hard to adaptively classify the relations due to biased class features and spurious correlations, such as similar relation classes having closer inter-class prototype representation. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive class augmented prototype network with instance-level and representation-level augmented mechanisms to strengthen the representation space. Specifically, we design the adaptive class augmentation mechanism to expand the representation of classes in instance-level augmentation, and class augmented representation learning with Bernoulli perturbation context attention to enhance the representation of class features in representation-level augmentation and explore adaptive debiased contrastive learning to train the model. Experimental results have been demonstrated on FewRel and NYT-25 under various few-shot settings, and the proposed model has improved accuracy and generalization, especially for cross-domain and different hard tasks.

Designing neural networks often requires a large number of artificial intelligence experts. However, such manual processes are time-consuming and require numerous resources. In this paper, we try to search neural network structures automatically for the image classification task. Moreover, considering the huge computational cost of neural architecture search (NAS), we attempt to apply a classification surrogate model based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to search neural network architectures (CSMEA-Net). The algorithm combines two objectives, i.e., minimizing the validation error and the computational complexity measured by the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) to achieve Pareto Optimality. In addition, we improve the components of the cell-based search space. The performance of network architectures discovered by our method is evaluated on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can find a higher-performance neural network architecture compared with both hand-crafted as well as automatically-designed networks.