In web data, advertising images are crucial for capturing user attention and improving advertising effectiveness. Most existing methods generate background for products primarily focus on the aesthetic quality, which may fail to achieve satisfactory online performance. To address this limitation, we explore the use of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for generating advertising images by optimizing for Click-Through Rate (CTR) as the primary objective. Firstly, we build targeted pre-training tasks, and leverage a large-scale e-commerce multimodal dataset to equip MLLMs with initial capabilities for advertising image generation tasks. To further improve the CTR of generated images, we propose a novel reward model to fine-tune pre-trained MLLMs through Reinforcement Learning (RL), which can jointly utilize multimodal features and accurately reflect user click preferences. Meanwhile, a product-centric preference optimization strategy is developed to ensure that the generated background content aligns with the product characteristics after fine-tuning, enhancing the overall relevance and effectiveness of the advertising images. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both online and offline metrics. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/Chenguoz/CAIG.

Session-Based Recommendation (SBR) systems, traditionally reliant on complex Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), often face challenges with marginal performance improvements despite increased model complexity. In this article, we dissect the classical GNN-based SBR models and empirically find that the sophisticated GNN propagations might be redundant, given the readout module plays a significant role in GNN-based models. Based on this observation, we introduce Atten-Mixer+, an advanced iteration of our previously developed Multi-Level Attention Mixture Network (Atten-Mixer). Atten-Mixer+ forgoes GNN propagation in favor of a dynamic and adaptive readout process, tailored to the unique characteristics of each session. Different from the vanilla version, Atten-Mixer+ features the Adaptive Intent Scaler (AIS) layer, which dynamically determines the depth of multi-level user intent analysis and a soft allocation approach for generating user intent queries across entire user interaction sequences. This innovative design allows Atten-Mixer+ to capture a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of user behaviors, overcoming the limitations of fixed-length analysis. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets highlight Atten-Mixer+’s superior efficiency and effectiveness, marking a significant step forward in the predictive accuracy of SBR systems.

The way research and business manage and utilize knowledge is undergoing a significant transformation, driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Deep learning and machine learning are emerging as powerful tools for optimizing knowledge management systems, leading to more informed and productive development. AI offers unique solutions for organizations struggling with information overload and inefficient knowledge transfer. These AI models can significantly improve data management and utilization. Imagine an AI-powered system that streamlines onboarding processes, provides precise answers to various queries, and even captures the valuable tacit knowledge (implicit skills and expertise) often residing within individuals. AI bridges the gap between explicit knowledge (easily documented information) and tacit knowledge, fostering a more comprehensive and accessible knowledge base. However, such AI systems solicit trustworthy and responsible approaches to mitigate potential misuse and malfunction. In this workshop, we aim to gather researchers and engineers from academia and industry to discuss the latest advances in trustworthy and responsible AI solutions for information and knowledge management systems.

Machine learning is becoming increasingly important in today's world. Beyond its powerful performances, there has been an emerging concern about the trustworthiness of machine learning, including but not limited to: robustness to malicious attacks, generalization to unseen datasets, and interpretability to explain its outputs. Such concerns are even more urgent in some safety-critical applications such as medical diagnosis and autonomous driving. Trustworthy machine learning (TrustML) aims to tackle these challenges from the perspectives of theory, algorithm, and applications. In this tutorial, we will give a comprehensive introduction to the recent advance of trustworthy machine learning in robustness, generalization, and interpretability. We will cover their problem formulation, related research, popular algorithms, and successful applications. Additionally, we will also introduce some potential challenges for future research. We do hope that this tutorial will not only serve as a platform to understand TrustML, but also raise the awareness of everyone for more trustworthy applications.

Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to predict the user's next action based on short and dynamic sessions. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in utilizing various elaborately designed graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture the pair-wise relationships among items, seemingly suggesting the design of more complicated models is the panacea for improving the empirical performance. However, these models achieve relatively marginal improvements with exponential growth in model complexity. In this paper, we dissect the classical GNN-based SBR models and empirically find that some sophisticated GNN propagations are redundant, given the readout module plays a significant role in GNN-based models. Based on this observation, we intuitively propose to remove the GNN propagation part, while the readout module will take on more responsibility in the model reasoning process. To this end, we propose the Multi-Level Attention Mixture Network (Atten-Mixer), which leverages both concept-view and instance-view readouts to achieve multi-level reasoning over item transitions. As simply enumerating all possible high-level concepts is infeasible for large real-world recommender systems, we further incorporate SBR-related inductive biases, i.e., local invariance and inherent priority to prune the search space. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposal. We also have already launched the proposed techniques to a large-scale e-commercial online service since April 2021, with significant improvements of top-tier business metrics demonstrated in the online experiments on live traffic.

Data augmentation has been proven to be an effective technique for developing machine learning models that are robust to known classes of distributional shifts (e.g., rotations of images), and alignment regularization is a technique often used together with data augmentation to further help the model learn representations invariant to the shifts used to augment the data. In this paper, motivated by a proliferation of options of alignment regularizations, we seek to evaluate the performances of several popular design choices along the dimensions of robustness and invariance, for which we introduce a new test procedure. Our synthetic experiment results speak to the benefits of squared ℓ2 norm regularization. Further, we also formally analyze the behavior of alignment regularization to complement our empirical study under assumptions we consider realistic. Finally, we test this simple technique we identify (worst-case data augmentation with squared ℓ2 norm alignment regularization) and show that the benefits of this method outrun those of the specially designed methods. We also release a software package in both TensorFlow and PyTorch for users to use the method with a couple of lines at https://github.com/jyanln/AlignReg.