EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Quanyu Dai
dblp:210/1089
· DBLP profile ↗
28ranked-venue papers in the field
7as first author
24since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-7578-2738ORCID · verified
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Information Retrieval & Web Search · 15 (3 first)Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 7 (2 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 5 (1 first)Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web & Information Systems · 1 (1 first)
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Optimizing Multi-Turn Interactive Recommendation Agents via Generative Intrinsic MotivationabstractLarge language models have given rise to interactive recommendation agents (IRAs). Through proactive clarification, tool invocation, and dynamic dialogue, IRAs shift recommender systems from passive prediction to interactive, proactive intelligence. For training IRAs, agentic reinforcement learning offers a natural pathway, as it enables models to learn interactive capabilities directly from environmental feedback without requiring costly annotated data. However, this process faces three key challenges: credit assignment in multi-turn interactions, efficient exploration in large action spaces, and coordinated learning of multiple interactive skills. Xueyang Feng, Jiakai Tang, Xu Chen 0017, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong |
WWW | 4 |
| 2025 | KnowTrace: Bootstrapping Iterative Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Structured Knowledge TracingabstractRecent advances in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) furnish large language models (LLMs) with iterative retrievals of relevant information to handle complex multi-hop questions. These methods typically alternate between LLM reasoning and retrieval to accumulate external information into the LLM's context. However, the ever-growing context inherently imposes an increasing burden on the LLM to perceive connections among critical information pieces, with futile reasoning steps further exacerbating this overload issue. In this paper, we present KnowTrace, an elegant RAG framework to (1) mitigate the context overload and (2) bootstrap higher-quality multi-step reasoning. Instead of simply piling the retrieved contents, KnowTrace autonomously traces out desired knowledge triplets to organize a specific knowledge graph relevant to the input question. Such a structured workflow not only empowers the LLM with an intelligible context for inference, but also naturally inspires a reflective mechanism of knowledge backtracing to identify contributive LLM generations as process supervision data for self-bootstrapping. Extensive experiments show that KnowTrace consistently surpasses existing methods across three multi-hop question answering benchmarks, and the bootstrapped version further amplifies the gains. Rui Li 0086, Quanyu Dai, Zeyu Zhang 0007, Xu Chen 0017, Zhenhua Dong, Ji-Rong Wen |
KDD (2) | 2 |
| 2025 | MCNet: Monotonic Calibration Networks for Expressive Uncertainty Calibration in Online AdvertisingabstractIn online advertising, uncertainty calibration aims to adjust a ranking model's probability predictions to better approximate the true likelihood of an event, e.g., a click or a conversion. However, existing calibration approaches may lack the ability to effectively model complex nonlinear relations, consider context features, and achieve balanced performance across different data subsets. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a novel model called Monotonic Calibration Networks, featuring three key designs: a monotonic calibration function (MCF), an order-preserving regularizer, and a field-balance regularizer. The nonlinear MCF is capable of naturally modeling and universally approximating the intricate relations between uncalibrated predictions and the posterior probabilities, thus being much more expressive than existing methods. MCF can also integrate context features using a flexible model architecture, thereby achieving context awareness. The order-preserving and field-balance regularizers promote the monotonic relationship between adjacent bins and the balanced calibration performance on data subsets, respectively. Experimental results on both public and industrial datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method in generating well-calibrated probability predictions. Quanyu Dai, Jiaren Xiao, Zhaocheng Du, Jieming Zhu, Chengxiao Luo, Xiao-Ming Wu 0003, Zhenhua Dong |
WWW | 1 |
| 2025 | EAGER-LLM: Enhancing Large Language Models as Recommenders through Exogenous Behavior-Semantic IntegrationabstractLarge language models (LLMs) are increasingly leveraged as foundational backbones in the development of advanced recommender systems, offering enhanced capabilities through their extensive knowledge and reasoning.Existing llm-based recommender systems (RSs) often face challenges due to the significant differences between the linguistic semantics of pre-trained LLMs and the collaborative semantics essential for RSs.These systems use pre-trained linguistic semantics but learn collaborative semantics from scratch via the llm-Backbone.However, LLMs are not designed for recommendations, leading to inefficient collaborative learning, weak result correlations, and poor integration of traditional RS features.To address these challenges, we propose EAGER-LLM, a decoder-only llm-based generative recommendation framework that integrates endogenous and exogenous behavioral and semantic information in a non-intrusive manner.Specifically, we propose 1) dual-source knowledge-rich item indices that integrates indexing sequences * Both authors contributed equally to this research. Minjie Hong, Yan Xia 0006, Zehan Wang 0001, Jieming Zhu, Ye Wang 0018, Sihang Cai, Xiaoda Yang, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Zhou Zhao 0001 |
WWW | 8 |
| 2025 | A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model-based AgentsabstractLarge language model (LLM)-based agents have recently attracted much attention from the research and industry communities. Compared with original LLMs, LLM-based agents are featured in their self-evolving capability, which is the basis for solving real-world problems that need long-term and complex agent-environment interactions. The key component to support agent-environment interactions is the memory of the agents. While previous studies have proposed many promising memory mechanisms, they are scattered in different papers, and there lacks a systematical review to summarize and compare these works from a holistic perspective, failing to abstract common and effective designing patterns for inspiring future studies. To bridge this gap, in this article, we propose a comprehensive survey on the memory mechanism of LLM-based agents. In specific, we first discuss “what is” and “why do we need” the memory in LLM-based agents. Then, we systematically review previous studies on how to design and evaluate the memory module. In addition, we also present many agent applications, where the memory module plays an important role. At last, we analyze the limitations of existing work and show important future directions. To keep up with the latest advances in this field, we create a repository at https://github.com/nuster1128/LLM_Agent_Memory_Survey . Zeyu Zhang 0007, Quanyu Dai, Xiaohe Bo, Chen Ma 0001, Rui Li 0086, Xu Chen 0017, Jieming Zhu, Zhenhua Dong, Ji-Rong Wen |
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. | 2 |
| 2024 | UniEmbedding: Learning Universal Multi-Modal Multi-Domain Item Embeddings via User-View Contrastive LearningabstractLearning high-quality item embeddings is crucial for recommendation tasks such as matching and ranking. However, existing methods often rely on ID-based item embeddings learned end-to-end with downstream recommendation models, which may suffer from overfitting and limited generalizability. In this paper, we aim to learn universal item embeddings (dubbed UniEmbedding) that capture multi-modal semantics, generalize across multiple domains, and serve different downstream tasks. To achieve this goal, we introduce the UniEmbedding pretraining framework, which includes three modules: a domain-aware multi-modal adapter, a user-view projection module, and contrastive learning objectives across domains. Compared to naive ID embeddings, UniEmbedding provides rich semantic information that generalizes more effectively across domains. Unlike multi-modal embeddings directly extracted from off-the-shelf pretrained models, UniEmbedding achieves better alignment between content semantics and behaviors. We evaluated UniEmbedding on both public and industrial datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in matching and ranking tasks. Furthermore, UniEmbedding has been deployed in multiple recommendation applications at Huawei, resulting in significant gains in user engagement metrics. Boqi Dai, Zhaocheng Du, Jieming Zhu, Deqing Zou, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Rui Zhang 0003, Hai-Tao Zheng 0002 |
CIKM | 6 |
| 2024 | Modeling User Attention in Music RecommendationabstractWith the popularity of online music services, personalized music recommendation has garnered much research interest. Recommendation models are typically trained on datasets constructed from user feedback, which includes both the active feedback (e.g., clicking the Like or Skip buttons) and passive feedback (e.g., auto-play), with passive feedback comprising the majority. Due to the unavailability of user attention, the massive amount of passive feedback is unreliable, significantly compromising the quality of the training data. How to estimate the user's attention on the target music has become a critical problem in music recommendation. Heuristic methods such as exponential decay and negative sampling have been proposed. However, they either neglect the sequential dependencies between feedback actions or utilize only a small fraction of passive samples, leading to inaccurate and biased attention estimation. In this paper, we naturally propose modeling user attention prediction as a positive-unlabeled (PU) learning problem, where active feedback is treated as positive samples and passive feedback is treated as unlabeled samples, as we can only ensure that the user's attention is focused when she provides active feedback. Then we propose an extended PU-learning model with sequential dependencies, called UAE, which contains an unbiased user attention estimator and an unbiased propensity estimator. Subsequently, a joint learning algorithm is developed in which the attention and propensity estimators are optimized in alternating fashion. Theoretical analysis shows the unbiasedness and variance of the attention estimator and the propensity estimator. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets demonstrate the proposed UAE's effectiveness and generality in enhancing downstream music recommendation. One week online A/B testing on Huawei Music App manifests that UAE can significantly increase the users' play count and time over 2%, further demonstrating the effectiveness of UAE in real-world music recommendation products. Sunhao Dai, Ninglu Shao, Jieming Zhu, Xiao Zhang 0034, Zhenhua Dong, Jun Xu 0001, Quanyu Dai, Ji-Rong Wen |
ICDE | 7 |
| 2024 | Multimodal Pretraining, Adaptation, and Generation for Recommendation: A SurveyabstractPersonalized recommendation serves as a ubiquitous channel for users to discover information tailored to their interests. However, traditional recommendation models primarily rely on unique IDs and categorical features for user-item matching, potentially overlooking the nuanced essence of raw item contents across multiple modalities such as text, image, audio, and video. This underutilization of multimodal data poses a limitation to recommender systems, especially in multimedia services like news, music, and short-video platforms. The recent advancements in large multimodal models offer new opportunities and challenges in developing content-aware recommender systems. This survey seeks to provide a comprehensive exploration of the latest advancements and future trajectories in multimodal pretraining, adaptation, and generation techniques, as well as their applications in enhancing recommender systems. Furthermore, we discuss current open challenges and opportunities for future research in this dynamic domain. We believe that this survey, alongside the curated resources, will provide valuable insights to inspire further advancements in this evolving landscape. Qijiong Liu, Jieming Zhu, Yanting Yang, Quanyu Dai, Zhaocheng Du, Xiao-Ming Wu 0003, Zhou Zhao 0001, Rui Zhang 0003, Zhenhua Dong |
KDD | 4 |
| 2023 | Sequential Recommendation with User Causal Behavior DiscoveryabstractThe key of sequential recommendation lies in the accurate item correlation modeling. Previous models infer such information based on item co-occurrences, which may fail to capture the real causal relations, and impact the recommendation performance and explainability. In this paper, we equip sequential recommendation with a novel causal discovery module to capture causalities among user behaviors. Our general idea is firstly assuming a causal graph underlying item correlations, and then we learn the causal graph jointly with the sequential recommender model by fitting the real user behavior data. More specifically, in order to satisfy the causality requirement, the causal graph is regularized by a differentiable directed acyclic constraint. Considering that the number of items in recommender systems can be very large, we represent different items with a unified set of latent clusters, and the causal graph is defined on the cluster level, which enhances the model scalability and robustness. In addition, we provide theoretical analysis on the identifiability of the learned causal graph. To the best of our knowledge, this paper makes a first step towards combining sequential recommendation with causal discovery. For evaluating the recommendation performance, we implement our framework with different neural sequential architectures, and compare them with many state-of-the-art methods based on real-world datasets. Empirical studies manifest that our model can on average improve the performance by about 6.1% and 11.3% on F1and NDCG, respectively. To evaluate the model explainability, we build a new dataset with human labeled explanations for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Zhenlei Wang, Xu Chen 0017, Rui Zhou 0025, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Ji-Rong Wen |
ICDE | 4 |
| 2023 | Robust Causal Inference for Recommender System to Overcome Noisy ConfoundersabstractRecently, there has been growing interest in integrating causal inference into recommender systems to answer the hypothetical question: "what would be the potential feedback when a user is recommended a product?" Various unbiased estimators, including Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) and Doubly Robust (DR), have been proposed to address this question. However, these estimators often assume that confounders are precisely observable, which is not always the case in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method called Adversarial Training-based IPS (AT-IPS), which uses adversarial training to handle noisy confounders. The proposed method defines a feasible region for the confounders, obtains the worst-case noise (adversarial noise) within the region, and jointly trains the propensity model and the prediction model against such noise to improve their robustness. We provide a theoretical analysis of the accuracy-robustness tradeoff of AT-IPS and demonstrate its superior performance compared to other popular estimators on both real-world and semi-synthetic datasets. Quanyu Dai, Xu Chen 0017, Zhenhua Dong, Ruiming Tang |
SIGIR | 2 |
| 2023 | FINAL: Factorized Interaction Layer for CTR PredictionabstractMulti-layer perceptron (MLP) serves as a core component in many deep models for click-through rate (CTR) prediction. However, vanilla MLP networks are inefficient in learning multiplicative feature interactions, making feature interaction learning an essential topic for CTR prediction. Existing feature interaction networks are effective in complementing the learning of MLPs, but they often fall short of the performance of MLPs when applied alone. Thus, their integration with MLP networks is necessary to achieve improved performance. This situation motivates us to explore a better alternative to the MLP backbone that could potentially replace MLPs. Inspired by factorization machines, in this paper, we propose FINAL, a factorized interaction layer that extends the widely-used linear layer and is capable of learning 2nd-order feature interactions. Similar to MLPs, multiple FINAL layers can be stacked into a FINAL block, yielding feature interactions with an exponential degree growth. We unify feature interactions and MLPs into a single FINAL block and empirically show its effectiveness as a replacement for the MLP block. Furthermore, we explore the ensemble of two FINAL blocks as an enhanced two-stream CTR model, setting a new state-of-the-art on open benchmark datasets. FINAL can be easily adopted as a building block and has achieved business metric gains in multiple applications at Huawei. Our source code will be made available at MindSpore/models and FuxiCTR/model_zoo. Jieming Zhu, Qinglin Jia, Guohao Cai, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Ruiming Tang, Rui Zhang 0003 |
SIGIR | 4 |
| 2023 | Recommendation with Causality enhanced Natural Language ExplanationsabstractExplainable recommendation has recently attracted increasing attention from both academic and industry communities. Among different explainable strategies, generating natural language explanations is an important method, which can deliver more informative, flexible and readable explanations to facilitate better user decisions. Despite the effectiveness, existing models are mostly optimized based on the observed datasets, which can be skewed due to the selection or exposure bias. To alleviate this problem, in this paper, we formulate the task of explainable recommendation with a causal graph, and design a causality enhanced framework to generate unbiased explanations. More specifically, we firstly define an ideal unbiased learning objective, and then derive a tractable loss for the observational data based on the inverse propensity score (IPS), where the key is a sample re-weighting strategy for equalizing the loss and ideal objective in expectation. Considering that the IPS estimated from the sparse and noisy recommendation datasets can be inaccurate, we introduce a fault tolerant mechanism by minimizing the maximum loss induced by the sample weights near the IPS. For more comprehensive modeling, we further analyze and infer the potential latent confounders induced by the complex and diverse user personalities. We conduct extensive experiments by comparing with the state-of-the-art methods based on three real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Jingsen Zhang, Xu Chen 0017, Jiakai Tang, Weiqi Shao, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Rui Zhang 0003 |
WWW | 5 |
| 2023 | Graph Transfer Learning via Adversarial Domain Adaptation With Graph ConvolutionabstractThis paper studies the problem of cross-network node classification to overcome the insufficiency of labeled data in a single network. It aims to leverage the label information in a partially labeled source network to assist node classification in a completely unlabeled or partially labeled target network. Existing methods for single network learning cannot solve this problem due to the domain shift across networks. Some multi-network learning methods heavily rely on the existence of cross-network connections, thus are inapplicable for this problem. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel graph transfer learning framework AdaGCN by leveraging the techniques of adversarial domain adaptation and graph convolution. It consists of two components: a semi-supervised learning component and an adversarial domain adaptation component. The former aims to learn class discriminative node representations with given label information of the source and target networks, while the latter contributes to mitigating the distribution divergence between the source and target domains to facilitate knowledge transfer. Extensive empirical evaluations on real-world datasets show that AdaGCN can successfully transfer class information with a low label rate on the source network and a substantial divergence between the source and target domains. Quanyu Dai, Xiao-Ming Wu 0003, Jiaren Xiao, Xiao Shen 0001, Dan Wang 0002 |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 1 |
| 2022 | LCD: Adaptive Label Correction for Denoising Music RecommendationabstractMusic recommendation is usually modeled as a Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction problem, which estimates the probability of a user listening a recommended song. CTR prediction can be formulated as a binary classification problem where the played songs are labeled as positive samples and the skipped songs are labeled as negative samples. However, such naively defined labels are noisy and biased in practice, causing inaccurate model predictions. In this work, we first identify serious label noise issues in an industrial music App, and then propose an adaptive Label Correction method for Denoising (LCD) music recommendation by ensembling the noisy labels and the model outputs to encourage a consensus prediction. Extensive offline experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of LCD on both industrial and public datasets. Furthermore, in a one-week online AB test, LCD also significantly increases both the music play count and time per user by 1% to 5%. Quanyu Dai, Yalei Lv, Jieming Zhu, Junjie Ye 0002, Zhenhua Dong, Rui Zhang 0003, Shutao Xia, Ruiming Tang |
CIKM | 1 |
| 2022 | A Generalized Doubly Robust Learning Framework for Debiasing Post-Click Conversion Rate PredictionabstractPost-click conversion rate (CVR) prediction is an essential task for discovering user interests and increasing platform revenues in a range of industrial applications. One of the most challenging problems of this task is the existence of severe selection bias caused by the inherent self-selection behavior of users and the item selection process of systems. Currently, doubly robust (DR) learning approaches achieve the state-of-the-art performance for debiasing CVR prediction. However, in this paper, by theoretically analyzing the bias, variance and generalization bounds of DR methods, we find that existing DR approaches may have poor generalization caused by inaccurate estimation of propensity scores and imputation errors, which often occur in practice. Motivated by such analysis, we propose a generalized learning framework that not only unifies existing DR methods, but also provides a valuable opportunity to develop a series of new debiasing techniques to accommodate different application scenarios. Based on the framework, we propose two new DR methods, namely DR-BIAS and DR-MSE. DR-BIAS directly controls the bias of DR loss, while DR-MSE balances the bias and variance flexibly, which achieves better generalization performance. In addition, we propose a novel tri-level joint learning optimization method for DR-MSE in CVR prediction, and an efficient training algorithm correspondingly. We conduct extensive experiments on both real-world and semi-synthetic datasets, which validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. Quanyu Dai, Haoxuan Li 0001, Peng Wu 0012, Zhenhua Dong, Xiao-Hua Zhou, Rui Zhang 0079, Rui Zhang 0003, Jie Sun 0007 |
KDD | 1 |
| 2022 | Counteracting User Attention Bias in Music Streaming Recommendation via Reward ModificationabstractIn streaming media applications, like music Apps, songs are recommended in a continuous way in users' daily life. The recommended songs are played automatically although users may not pay any attention to them, posing a challenge of user attention bias in training recommendation models, i.e., the training instances contain a large number of false-positive labels (users' feedback). Existing approaches either directly use the auto-feedbacks or heuristically delete the potential false-positive labels. Both of the approaches lead to biased results because the false-positive labels cause the shift of training data distribution, hurting the accuracy of the recommendation models. In this paper, we propose a learning-based counterfactual approach to adjusting the user auto-feedbacks and learning the recommendation models using Neural Dueling Bandit algorithm, called NDB. Specifically, NDB maintains two neural networks: a user attention network for computing the importance weights that are used for modifying the original rewards, and another random network trained with dueling bandit for conducting online recommendations based on the modified rewards. Theoretical analysis showed that the modified rewards are statistically unbiased, and the learned bandit policy enjoys a sub-linear regret bound. Experimental results demonstrated that NDB can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art baselines. Xiao Zhang 0034, Sunhao Dai, Jun Xu 0001, Zhenhua Dong, Quanyu Dai, Ji-Rong Wen |
KDD | 5 |
| 2022 | ReLoop: A Self-Correction Continual Learning Loop for Recommender SystemsabstractDeep learning-based recommendation has become a widely adopted technique in various online applications. Typically, a deployed model undergoes frequent re-training to capture users' dynamic behaviors from newly collected interaction logs. However, the current model training process only acquires users' feedbacks as labels, but fails to take into account the errors made in previous recommendations. Inspired by the intuition that humans usually reflect and learn from mistakes, in this paper, we attempt to build a self-correction continual learning loop (dubbed ReLoop) for recommender systems. In particular, a new customized loss is employed to encourage every new model version to reduce prediction errors over the previous model version during training. Our ReLoop learning framework enables a continual self-correction process in the long run and thus is expected to obtain better performance over existing training strategies. Both offline experiments and an online A/B test have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of ReLoop. Guohao Cai, Jieming Zhu, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Xiuqiang He 0001, Ruiming Tang, Rui Zhang 0003 |
SIGIR | 3 |
| 2022 | BARS: Towards Open Benchmarking for Recommender SystemsabstractThe past two decades have witnessed the rapid development of personalized recommendation techniques. Despite the significant progress made in both research and practice of recommender systems, to date, there is a lack of a widely-recognized benchmarking standard in this field. Many of the existing studies perform model evaluations and comparisons in an ad-hoc manner, for example, by employing their own private data splits or using a different experimental setting. However, such conventions not only increase the difficulty in reproducing existing studies, but also lead to inconsistent experimental results among them. This largely limits the credibility and practical value of research results in this field. To tackle these issues, we present an initiative project aimed for open benchmarking for recommender systems. In contrast to some earlier attempts towards this goal, we take one further step by setting up a standardized benchmarking pipeline for reproducible research, which integrates all the details about datasets, source code, hyper-parameter settings, running logs, and evaluation results. The benchmark is designed with comprehensiveness and sustainability in mind. It spans both matching and ranking tasks, and also allows anyone to easily follow and contribute. We believe that our benchmark could not only reduce the redundant efforts of researchers to re-implement or re-run existing baselines, but also drive more solid and reproducible research on recommender systems. Jieming Zhu, Quanyu Dai, Liangcai Su, Jinyang Liu 0002, Guohao Cai, Xi Xiao 0001, Rui Zhang 0003 |
SIGIR | 2 |
| 2022 | Social Attentive Deep Q-Networks for Recommender SystemsabstractRecommender systems aim to accurately and actively provide users with potentially interesting items (products, information or services). Deep reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to recommender systems, but still heavily suffer from data sparsity and cold-start in real-world tasks. In this work, we propose an effective way to address such issues by leveraging the pervasive social networks among users in the estimation of action-values (Q). Specifically, we develop a Social Attentive Deep Q-network (SADQN) to approximate the optimal action-value function based on the preferences of both individual users and social neighbors, by successfully utilizing a social attention layer to model the influence between them. Further, we propose an enhanced variant of SADQN, termed SADQN++, to model the complicated and diverse trade-offs between personal preferences and social influence for all involved users, making the agent more powerful and flexible in learning the optimal policies. The experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed SADQNs remarkably outperform the state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning agents, with reasonable computation cost. Yu Lei 0004, Zhitao Wang, Wenjie Li 0002, Hongbin Pei, Quanyu Dai |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 5 |
| 2021 | SimpleX: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Collaborative FilteringabstractCollaborative filtering (CF) is a widely studied research topic in recommender systems. The learning of a CF model generally depends on three major components, namely interaction encoder, loss function, and negative sampling. While many existing studies focus on the design of more powerful interaction encoders, the impacts of loss functions and negative sampling ratios have not yet been well explored. In this work, we show that the choice of loss function as well as negative sampling ratio is equivalently important. More specifically, we propose the cosine contrastive loss (CCL) and further incorporate it to a simple unified CF model, dubbed SimpleX. Extensive experiments have been conducted on 10 benchmark datasets and compared with 28 existing CF models in total. Surprisingly, the results show that, under our CCL loss and a large negative sampling ratio, SimpleX can surpass most sophisticated state-of-the-art models by a large margin (e.g., max 48.5% improvement in [email protected] over LightGCN). We believe that SimpleX could not only serve as a simple strong baseline to foster future research on CF, but also shed light on the potential research direction towards improving loss function and negative sampling. Kelong Mao, Jieming Zhu, Jinpeng Wang 0002, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Xi Xiao 0001, Xiuqiang He 0001 |
CIKM | 4 |
| 2021 | Top-N Recommendation with Counterfactual User Preference SimulationabstractTop-N recommendation, which aims to learn user ranking-based preference, has long been a fundamental problem in a wide range of applications. Traditional models usually motivate themselves by designing complex or tailored architectures based on different assumptions. However, the training data of recommender system can be extremely sparse and imbalanced, which poses great challenges for boosting the recommendation performance. To alleviate this problem, in this paper, we propose to reformulate the recommendation task within the causal inference framework, which enables us to counterfactually simulate user ranking-based preferences to handle the data scarce problem. The core of our model lies in the counterfactual question: "what would be the user's decision if the recommended items had been different?''. To answer this question, we firstly formulate the recommendation process with a series of structural equation models (SEMs), whose parameters are optimized based on the observed data. Then, we actively indicate many recommendation lists (called intervention in the causal inference terminology) which are not recorded in the dataset, and simulate user feedback according to the learned SEMs for generating new training samples. Instead of randomly intervening on the recommendation list, we design a learning-based method to discover more informative training samples. Considering that the learned SEMs can be not perfect, we, at last, theoretically analyze the relation between the number of generated samples and the model prediction error, based on which a heuristic method is designed to control the negative effect brought by the prediction error. Extensive experiments are conducted based on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Mengyue Yang, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Xu Chen 0017, Xiuqiang He 0001, Jun Wang 0012 |
CIKM | 2 |
| 2021 | Dimensionwise Separable 2-D Graph Convolution for Unsupervised and Semi-Supervised Learning on GraphsabstractGraph convolutional neural networks (GCN) have been the model of choice for graph representation learning, which is mainly due to the effective design of graph convolution that computes the representation of a node by aggregating those of its neighbors. However, existing GCN variants commonly use 1-D graph convolution that solely operates on the object link graph without exploring informative relational information among object attributes. This significantly limits their modeling capability and may lead to inferior performance on noisy and sparse real-world networks. In this paper, we explore 2-D graph convolution to jointly model object links and attribute relations for graph representation learning. Specifically, we propose a computationally efficient dimensionwise separable 2-D graph convolution (DSGC) for filtering node features. Theoretically, we show that DSGC can reduce intra-class variance of node features on both the object dimension and the attribute dimension to learn more effective representations. Empirically, we demonstrate that by modeling attribute relations, DSGC achieves significant performance gain over state-of-the-art methods for node classification and clustering on a variety of real-world networks. The source code for reproducing the experimental results is available at https://github.com/liqimai/DSGC. Qimai Li, Xiaotong Zhang 0003, Han Liu 0008, Quanyu Dai, Xiao-Ming Wu 0003 |
KDD | 4 |
| 2021 | Dual Sequence Transformer for Query-based Interactive RecommendationabstractInteractive recommendation has drawn widespread attention from both academia and industry due to its effectiveness in real-world mobile applications. Instead of receiving message passively, customers can exploit further with less effort through generated queries. Usually, such systems mainly contain two main components: query generation and item recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that models both queries and items in shared latent embedding space via a dual sequence transformer structure, which captures customer's potential interest from the prospect of reconciling the historical queries and corresponding customers interactions. We propose a click-through-rate model to generate query candidates, and a session search model for further more precise information. Comprehensive offline and online experiments are conducted, and the results demonstrate that our proposed dual-sequence-transformer based model can better utilize interaction and improve the accuracy of recommendations. Guohao Cai, Quanyu Dai, Gang Wang 0056, Zhenhua Dong, Chaoliang Zhang, Xiuqiang He 0001, Lifeng Shang |
MDM | 3 |
| 2021 | Adversarial training regularization for negative sampling based network embedding
Quanyu Dai, Xiao Shen 0001, Zimu Zheng, Liang Zhang 0042, Qiang Li 0024, Dan Wang 0002 |
Inf. Sci. | 1 |
| 2020 | Contextual Anomaly Detection in Solder Paste Inspection with Multi-Task LearningabstractIn this article, we study solder paste inspection (SPI), an important stage that is used in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, where abnormal boards should be detected. A highly accurate SPI can substantially reduce human expert involvement, as well as reduce the waste in disposing of the boards in good condition. A key difference today is that because of increasing demand in board customization, the number of board types increases substantially and quantity of the boards produced in each type decreases. Thus, the previous approaches where a fine-tuned model is developed for each board type are no longer viable. Intrinsically, our problem is an anomaly detection problem. A major specialty in today’s SPI is that the target tasks for prediction cannot be fully pre-determined due to context changes during the solder paste printing stage. Our experiences show that a conventional approach to first define a set of tasks and train these tasks offline will lead to low accuracy. Here, we propose a novel multi-task approach, where the performance of all target tasks is ensured simultaneously. We note that the SPI process is streamlined and automatic, allowing the SPI time for only a few seconds. We propose a fast clustering algorithm that reuses existing models to avoid retraining and fine tune in the inference phase. We evaluate our approach using 3-month data collected from production lines. We show that we can reduce 81.28% of false alarms. This can translate to annual savings of $11.3 million. Zimu Zheng, Jie Pu, Linghui Liu, Dan Wang 0002, Xiangming Mei, Quanyu Dai |
ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol. | 7 |
| 2019 | Regularized Adversarial Sampling and Deep Time-aware Attention for Click-Through Rate PredictionabstractImproving the performance of click-through rate (CTR) prediction remains one of the core tasks in online advertising systems. With the rise of deep learning, CTR prediction models with deep networks remarkably enhance model capacities. In deep CTR models, exploiting users' historical data is essential for learning users' behaviors and interests. As existing CTR prediction works neglect the importance of the temporal signals when embed users' historical clicking records, we propose a time-aware attention model which explicitly uses absolute temporal signals for expressing the users' periodic behaviors and relative temporal signals for expressing the temporal relation between items. Besides, we propose a regularized adversarial sampling strategy for negative sampling which eases the classification imbalance of CTR data and can make use of the strong guidance provided by the observed negative CTR samples. The adversarial sampling strategy significantly improves the training efficiency, and can be co-trained with the time-aware attention model seamlessly. Experiments are conducted on real-world CTR datasets from both in-station and out-station advertising places. Yikai Wang 0001, Liang Zhang 0042, Quanyu Dai, Fuchun Sun 0001, Bo Zhang 0010, Weipeng Yan, Yongjun Bao |
CIKM | 3 |
| 2019 | Ranking Network Embedding via Adversarial Learning
Quanyu Dai, Qiang Li 0024, Liang Zhang 0042, Dan Wang 0002 |
PAKDD (3) | 1 |
| 2019 | Adversarial Training Methods for Network EmbeddingabstractNetwork Embedding is the task of learning continuous node representations for networks, which has been shown effective in a variety of tasks such as link prediction and node classification. Most of existing works aim to preserve different network structures and properties in low-dimensional embedding vectors, while neglecting the existence of noisy information in many real-world networks and the overfitting issue in the embedding learning process. Most recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) based regularization methods are exploited to regularize embedding learning process, which can encourage a global smoothness of embedding vectors. These methods have very complicated architecture and suffer from the well-recognized non-convergence problem of GANs. In this paper, we aim to introduce a more succinct and effective local regularization method, namely adversarial training, to network embedding so as to achieve model robustness and better generalization performance. Firstly, the adversarial training method is applied by defining adversarial perturbations in the embedding space with an adaptive L2 norm constraint that depends on the connectivity pattern of node pairs. Though effective as a regularizer, it suffers from the interpretability issue which may hinder its application in certain real-world scenarios. To improve this strategy, we further propose an interpretable adversarial training method by enforcing the reconstruction of the adversarial examples in the discrete graph domain. These two regularization methods can be applied to many existing embedding models, and we take DeepWalk as the base model for illustration in the paper. Empirical evaluations in both link prediction and node classification demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Quanyu Dai, Xiao Shen 0001, Liang Zhang 0042, Qiang Li 0024, Dan Wang 0002 |
WWW | 1 |