Nowadays, the success of financial organizations heavily depends on their ability to process digital traces generated by their clients, e.g., transaction histories, gathered from various sources to improve user modeling pipelines. As general-purpose LLMs struggle with time-distributed tabular data, production stacks still depend on specialized tabular and sequence models that are limited in transferability and require labeled data. To address this, we introduce FinTRACE, a retrieval-first architecture that converts raw transactions into reusable feature representations, applies rule-based detectors, and stores the resulting signals in a behavioral knowledge base with graded associations to the objectives of downstream tasks. Across public and industrial benchmarks, FinTRACE substantially improves low-supervision transaction analytics, doubling zero-shot MCC on churn prediction performance from 0.19 to 0.38 and improving 16-shot MCC from 0.25 to 0.40. We further use FinTRACE to ground LLMs via instruction tuning on retrieved behavioral patterns, achieving state-of-the-art LLM results on transaction analytics problems.

Financial organizations collect a huge amount of temporal (sequential) data about clients, which is typically collected from multiple sources (modalities). Despite the urgent practical need, developing deep learning techniques suitable to handle such data is limited by the absence of large open-source multi-source real-world datasets of event sequences. To fill this gap, which is mainly caused by security reasons, we present the first industrial-scale publicly available multimodal banking dataset, MBD, that contains information on more than 2M corporate clients of a large bank. Clients are represented by several data sources: 950M bank transactions, 1B geo position events, 5M embeddings of dialogues with technical support, and monthly aggregated purchases of four bank products. All entries are properly anonymized from real proprietary bank data, and the experiments confirm that our anonymization still saves all significant information for introduced downstream tasks. MBD enables supports campaigning task (predict future customer purchases). We provide numerical results for the state-of-the-art event sequence modeling techniques demonstrate the superiority of fusion baselines over single-modal techniques for this task. HuggingFace Link: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ai-lab/MBD Github Link: https://github.com/Dzhambo/MBD

Since their introduction, Transformer-based models, such as SASRec and BERT4Rec, have become common baselines for sequential recommendations, surpassing earlier neural and non-neural methods. A number of following publications have shown that the effectiveness of these models can be improved by, for example, slightly updating the architecture of the Transformer layers, using better training objectives, and employing improved loss functions. However, the additivity of these modular improvements has not been systematically benchmarked - this is the gap we aim to close in this paper. Through our experiments, we identify a very strong model that uses SASRec's training objective, LiGR Transformer layers, and Sampled Softmax Loss. We call this combination eSASRec (Enhanced SASRec). While we primarily focus on realistic, production-like evaluation, in our preliminarily study we find that common academic benchmarks show eSASRec to be 23% more effective compared to the most recent state-of-the-art models, such as ActionPiece. In our main production-like benchmark, eSASRec resides on the Pareto frontier in terms of the accuracy-coverage tradeoff (alongside the recent industrial models HSTU and FuXi. As the modifications compared to the original SASRec are relatively straightforward and no extra features are needed (such as timestamps in HSTU), we believe that eSASRec can be easily integrated into existing recommendation pipelines and can can serve as a strong yet very simple baseline for emerging complicated algorithms. To facilitate this, we provide the open-source implementations for our models and benchmarks in repository https://github.com/blondered/transformer_benchmark

As machine learning increasingly becomes a crucial tool for geospatial data analysis, finding and deploying a suitable model presents significant challenges, including the need for expertise in both programming and geospatial analysis, organizing data flow, and accurately assessing the results. To address these challenges, this paper introduces GlobeFlowGPT, a multimodal, chat-based framework designed to meet these demands by integrating domain-specific tools, machine learning models, Multimodal Large Language Models, and essential operational data. It leverages a Large Language Model orchestrator, facilitating complex geospatial tasks through a conversational interface. GlobeFlowGPT's flexible, containerized architecture allows for the rapid integration of cutting-edge models tailored for geospatial data, ensuring that the framework remains scalable and relevant amid ongoing technological advancements. We demonstrate the ability of our framework to streamline the analysis of geospatial data and expand the capabilities of modern MLLMs with complex geospatial machine learning models.

In the rapidly evolving domain of Recommender Systems (RecSys), new algorithms frequently claim state-of-the-art performance based on evaluations over a limited set of arbitrarily selected datasets. However, this approach may fail to holistically reflect their effectiveness due to the significant impact of dataset characteristics on algorithm performance. Addressing this deficiency, this paper introduces a novel benchmarking methodology to facilitate a fair and robust comparison of RecSys algorithms, thereby advancing evaluation practices. By utilizing a diverse set of 30 open datasets, including two introduced in this work, and evaluating 11 collaborative filtering algorithms across 9 metrics, we critically examine the influence of dataset characteristics on algorithm performance. We further investigate the feasibility of aggregating outcomes from multiple datasets into a unified ranking. Through rigorous experimental analysis, we validate the reliability of our methodology under the variability of datasets, offering a benchmarking strategy that balances quality and computational demands. This methodology enables a fair yet effective means of evaluating RecSys algorithms, providing valuable guidance for future research endeavors.

We develop and evaluate neural architectures to model the user behavior in recommender systems (RS) inspired by click models for Web search but going beyond standard click models. Proposed architectures include recurrent networks, Transformer-based models that alleviate the quadratic complexity of self-attention, adversarial and hierarchical architectures. Our models outperform baselines on the ContentWise and RL4RS datasets and can be used in RS simulators to model user response for RS evaluation and pretraining.

Recommender systems are essential for personalized content delivery and have become increasingly popular recently. However, traditional recommender systems are limited in their ability to capture complex relationships between users and items. Dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs) have recently emerged as a promising solution for improving recommender systems by incorporating temporal and sequential information in dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel method, "Ti-DC-GNN" (Time-Interval Dual Causal Graph Neural Networks), based on an intermediate representation of graph evolution as a sequence of time-interval graphs. The main parts of the method are the novel forms of interval graphs: graph of causality and graph of consequence that explicitly preserve inter-relationships between edges (user-items interactions). The local and global message passing are developed based on edge memory to identify short-term and long-term dependencies. Experiments on several well-known datasets show that our method consistently outperforms modern temporal GNNs with node memory alone in dynamic edge prediction tasks.

In this paper, we consider the problem of event recognition on single images. In contrast to conventional fine-tuning of convolutional neural networks (CNN), we proposed to use image captioning, i.e., a generative model that converts images to textual descriptions. The motivation here is the possibility to combine conventional CNNs with a completely different approach in an ensemble with high diversity. As event recognition task has nothing serial or temporal, obtained captions are one-hot encoded and summarized into a sparse feature vector suitable for the learning of an arbitrary classifier. We provide the experimental study of several feature extractors for Photo Event Collection, Web Image Dataset for Event Recognition and Multi-Label Curation of Flickr Events Dataset. It is shown that the image captions trained on the Conceptual Captions dataset can be classified more accurately than the features from an object detector, though they both are obviously not as rich as the CNN-based features. However, an ensemble of CNN and our approach provides state-of-the-art results for several event datasets.