In industrial recommendation systems, there are several mini-apps designed to meet the diverse interests and needs of users. The sample space of them is merely a small subset of the entire space, making it challenging to train an efficient model. In recent years, there have been many excellent studies related to cross-domain recommendation aimed at mitigating the problem of data sparsity. However, few of them have simultaneously considered the adaptability of both sample and representation continual transfer setting to the target task. To overcome the above issue, we propose a Entire space Continual and Adaptive Transfer learning framework called ECAT which includes two core components: First, as for sample transfer, we propose a two-stage method that realizes a coarse-to-fine process. Specifically, we perform an initial selection through a graph guided method, followed by a fine-grained selection using domain adaptation method. Second, we propose an adaptive knowledge distillation method for continually transferring the representations from a model that is well-trained on the entire space dataset. ECAT enables full utilization of the entire space samples and representations under the supervision of the target task, while avoiding negative migration. Comprehensive experiments on real-world industrial datasets from Taobao show that ECAT advances state-of-the-art performance on offline metrics, and brings +13.6% CVR and +8.6% orders for Baiyibutie, a famous mini-app of Taobao.

Although pre-trained language models~(PLMs) have recently advanced the research progress in mathematical reasoning, they are not specially designed as a capable multi-task solver, suffering from high cost for multi-task deployment (e.g. a model copy for a task) and inferior performance on complex mathematical problems in practical applications. To address these issues, we propose JiuZhang 2.0, a unified Chinese PLM specially for multi-task mathematical problem solving. Our idea is to maintain a moderate-sized model and employ the cross-task knowledge sharing to improve the model capacity in a multi-task setting. Specially, we construct a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture for modeling mathematical text, to capture the common mathematical knowledge across tasks. For optimizing the MoE architecture, we design multi-task continual pre-training and multi-task fine-tuning strategies for multi-task adaptation. These training strategies can effectively decompose the knowledge from the task data and establish the cross-task sharing via expert networks. To further improve the general capacity of solving different complex tasks, we leverage large language models (LLMs) as complementary models to iteratively refine the generated solution by our PLM, via in-context learning. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.

This paper aims to advance the mathematical intelligence of machines by presenting the first Chinese mathematical pre-trained language model (PLM) for effectively understanding and representing mathematical problems. Unlike other standard NLP tasks, mathematical texts are difficult to understand, since they involve mathematical terminology, symbols and formulas in the problem statement. Typically, it requires complex mathematical logic and background knowledge for solving mathematical problems.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend suitable items to users through natural language conversations. For developing effective CRSs, a major technical issue is how to accurately infer user preference from very limited conversation context. To address issue, a promising solution is to incorporate external data for enriching the context information. However, prior studies mainly focus on designing fusion models tailored for some specific type of external data, which is not general to model and utilize multi-type external data. To effectively leverage multi-type external data, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine contrastive learning framework to improve data semantic fusion for CRS. In our approach, we first extract and represent multi-grained semantic units from different data signals, and then align the associated multi-type semantic units in a coarse-to-fine way. To implement this framework, we design both coarse-grained and fine-grained procedures for modeling user preference, where the former focuses on more general, coarse-grained semantic fusion and the latter focuses on more specific, fine-grained semantic fusion. Such an approach can be extended to incorporate more kinds of external data. Extensive experiments on two public CRS datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in both recommendation and conversation tasks.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend high-quality items to users through interactive conversations. Although several efforts have been made for CRS, two major issues still remain to be solved. First, the conversation data itself lacks of sufficient contextual information for accurately understanding users' preference. Second, there is a semantic gap between natural language expression and item-level user preference.