EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Tong Yu 0001
dblp:32/1593-1
· DBLP profile ↗
31ranked-venue papers in the field
4as first author
24since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-5991-2050ORCID · conflict
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Information Retrieval & Web Search · 13Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 11 (3 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 3Big Data, Cloud & Distributed Data Systems · 3 (1 first)Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web & Information Systems · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Federated Large Language Models: Current Progress and Future Directions
Yuhang Yao 0003, Junda Wu, Chengkai Huang, Yu Xia 0007, Tong Yu 0001, Ruiyi Zhang 0002, Sungchul Kim, Ryan Rossi, Ang Li 0005, Lina Yao 0001, Julian J. McAuley, Yiran Chen 0001, Carlee Joe-Wong |
PAKDD (4) | 6 |
| 2026 | Dual Conditional Diffusion for Sequential RecommendationabstractRecent advancements in diffusion models have shown promising results in sequential recommendation (SR). Existing approaches predominantly rely on implicit conditional diffusion models, which compress user behaviors into a single representation during the forward diffusion process. While effective to some extent, this oversimplification often leads to the loss of sequential and contextual information, which is critical for understanding user behavior. Moreover, explicit information, such as user-item interactions or sequential patterns, remains underutilized, despite its potential to directly guide the recommendation process and improve precision. However, combining implicit and explicit information is non-trivial, as it requires dynamically integrating these complementary signals while avoiding noise and irrelevant patterns within user behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose Dual Conditional Diffusion Models for Sequential Recommendation (DCRec), which effectively integrates implicit and explicit information by embedding dual conditions into both the forward and reverse diffusion processes. This allows the model to retain valuable sequential and contextual information while leveraging explicit user-item interactions to guide the recommendation process. Specifically, we introduce the Dual Conditional Diffusion Transformer (DCDT), which dynamically integrate both implicit and explicit signals throughout the diffusion stages, ensuring contextual understanding and minimizing the influence of irrelevant patterns. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that DCRec significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Hongtao Huang, Chengkai Huang, Tong Yu 0001, Xiaojun Chang, Wen Hu 0001, Julian J. McAuley, Lina Yao 0001 |
WSDM | 3 |
| 2026 | Multi-Agent Collaborative Filtering: Orchestrating Users and Items for Agentic RecommendationsabstractAgentic recommendations cast recommenders as large language model (LLM) agents that can plan, reason, use tools, and interact with users of varying preferences in web applications. However, most existing agentic recommender systems focus on generic single-agent plan-execute workflows or multi-agent task decomposition pipelines. Without recommendation-oriented design, they often underuse the collaborative signals in the user–item interaction history, leading to unsatisfying recommendation results. To address this, we propose the Multi-Agent Collaborative Filtering (MACF) framework for agentic recommendations, drawing an analogy between traditional collaborative filtering algorithms and LLM-based multi-agent collaboration. Specifically, given a target user and query, we instantiate similar users and relevant items as LLM agents with unique profiles. Each agent is able to call retrieval tools, suggest candidate items, and interact with other agents. Different from the static preference aggregation in traditional collaborative filtering, MACF employs a central orchestrator agent to adaptively manage the collaboration between user and item agents via dynamic agent recruitment and personalized collaboration instruction. Experimental results on datasets from three different domains show the advantages of our MACF framework compared to strong agentic recommendation baselines. Yu Xia 0007, Sungchul Kim, Tong Yu 0001, Ryan Rossi, Julian J. McAuley |
WWW | 3 |
| 2026 | DrunkAgent: Stealthy Memory Corruption in LLM-Powered Recommender Agents
Shiyi Yang 0001, Zhibo Hu, Xinshu Li 0001, Chen Wang 0008, Tong Yu 0001, Xiwei Xu 0001, Liming Zhu 0001, Lina Yao 0001 |
WWW | 5 |
| 2026 | Learning Causality-Aware Exploration with Transformers for Goal-Oriented NavigationabstractNavigation is a fundamental task in the research of Embodied AI, and recent advances in machine learning algorithms have garnered growing interest in developing versatile Embodied AI systems. However, current research in this domain reveals opportunities for improvement. First, the direct application of RNNs and Transformers often overlooks the distinct characteristics of navigation tasks compared to traditional sequential data modeling. These methods are inherently designed to capture long-term dependencies, which are relatively weak in navigation scenarios, potentially limiting their performance in such tasks. Second, the reliance on task-specific configurations, such as pre-trained modules and dataset-specific logic, compromises the generalizability of these methods. We address these constraints by initially exploring the unique differences between Navigation tasks and other sequential data tasks through the lens of Causality, presenting a causal framework to elucidate the inadequacies of conventional sequential methods for Navigation. By leveraging this causal perspective, we propose Causality-Aware Transformer (CAT) Networks for Navigation, featuring a Causal Understanding Module to enhance the model’s Environmental Understanding capability. Meanwhile, our method is devoid of task-specific inductive biases and can be trained in an End-to-End manner, which enhances the method’s generalizability across various contexts. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our methodology consistently surpasses benchmark performances across a spectrum of settings, tasks, and simulation environments, specifically, in Object Navigation within RoboTHOR, Objective Navigation, Point Navigation in Habitat, and R2R Navigation. Extensive ablation studies reveal that the performance gains can be attributed to the Causal Understanding Module, which demonstrates effectiveness and efficiency in both Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Learning settings. Additionally, further analysis highlights the robustness of our method, demonstrating its capacity to consistently perform well across diverse experimental settings and varying conditions. This robustness underscores the adaptability and generalizability of our approach, reinforcing its potential for application across a wide range of tasks. Ruoyu Wang 0038, Tong Yu 0001, Mingjie Li 0006, Yuanjiang Cao, Yao Liu 0017, Lina Yao 0001 |
ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol. | 2 |
| 2025 | A Tutorial on Agentic LLM for Recommender Systems
Chengkai Huang, Junda Wu, Tong Yu 0001, Julian J. McAuley, Lina Yao 0001 |
RecSys | 3 |
| 2025 | Interactive Visualization Recommendation with Hier-SUCBabstractVisualization recommendation aims to enable rapid visual analysis of massive datasets. In real-world scenarios, it is essential to quickly gather and comprehend user preferences to cover users from diverse backgrounds, including varying skill levels and analytical tasks. Previous approaches to personalized visualization recommendations are non-interactive and rely on initial user data for new users. As a result, these models cannot effectively explore options or adapt to real-time feedback. To address this limitation, we propose an interactive personalized visualization recommendation (PVisRec) system that learns on user feedback from previous interactions. For more interactive and accurate recommendations, we propose Hier-SUCB, a contextual combinatorial semi-bandit in the PVisRec setting. Theoretically, we show an improved overall regret bound with the same rank of time but an improved rank of action space. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of Hier-SUCB through extensive experiments where it is comparable to offline methods and outperforms other bandit algorithms in the setting of visualization recommendation. Songwen Hu, Ryan Rossi, Tong Yu 0001, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Sungchul Kim, Shuai Li 0010 |
WWW | 3 |
| 2025 | Cache-Craft: Managing Chunk-Caches for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented GenerationabstractRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is often used with Large Language Models (LLMs) to infuse domain knowledge or user-specific information. In RAG, given a user query, a retriever extracts chunks of relevant text from a knowledge base. These chunks are sent to an LLM as part of the input prompt. Typically, any given chunk is repeatedly retrieved across user questions. However, currently, for every question, attention layers in LLMs fully compute the Keys and Values (KVs) repeatedly for the input chunks, as state-of-the-art methods cannot reuse KV-caches when chunks appear at arbitrary locations or with arbitrary contexts. Naive reuse leads to output quality degradation. This leads to potentially redundant computations on expensive GPUs and increases latency. In this work, we propose Cache-Craft , a system for managing and reusing precomputed KVs corresponding to the text chunks (which we call chunk-caches ) in RAG-based systems. We present how to identify chunk-caches that are reusable, how to efficiently perform a small fraction of recomputation to fix the cache and maintain output quality, and how to efficiently store and evict chunk-caches in the hardware for maximizing reuse while masking any overheads. With real production workloads as well as synthetic datasets, we show that Cache-Craft reduces redundant computation by 51% over SOTA prefix-caching and 75% over full recomputation. Additionally, with continuous batching on a real production workload, we get a 1.6× speed up in throughput for both the LLama-3-8B and 70B models and a 2.1× and 2× reduction in end-to-end response latency respectively, compared to prefix-caching, while maintaining generation quality. Shubham Agarwal 0007, Sai Sundaresan, Subrata Mitra, Debabrata Mahapatra, Archit Gupta, Rounak Sharma, Nirmal Joshua Kapu, Tong Yu 0001, Shiv Kumar Saini |
Proc. ACM Manag. Data | 8 |
| 2024 | CoRAL: Collaborative Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models Improve Long-tail RecommendationabstractThe long-tail recommendation is a challenging task for traditional recommender systems, due to data sparsity and data imbalance issues. The recent development of large language models (LLMs) has shown their abilities in complex reasoning, which can help to deduce users' preferences based on very few previous interactions. However, since most LLM-based systems rely on items' semantic meaning as the sole evidence for reasoning, the collaborative information of user-item interactions is neglected, which can cause the LLM's reasoning to be misaligned with task-specific collaborative information of the dataset. To further align LLMs' reasoning to task-specific user-item interaction knowledge, we introduce collaborative retrieval-augmented LLMs, CoRAL, which directly incorporate collaborative evidence into the prompts. Based on the retrieved user-item interactions, the LLM can analyze shared and distinct preferences among users, and summarize the patterns indicating which types of users would be attracted by certain items. The retrieved collaborative evidence prompts the LLM to align its reasoning with the user-item interaction patterns in the dataset. However, since the capacity of the input prompt is limited, finding the minimally-sufficient collaborative information for recommendation tasks can be challenging. We propose to find the optimal interaction set through a sequential decision-making process and develop a retrieval policy learned through a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, CoRAL. Our experimental results show that CoRAL can significantly improve LLMs' reasoning abilities on specific recommendation tasks. Our analysis also reveals that CoRAL can more efficiently explore collaborative information through reinforcement learning. Junda Wu, Cheng-Chun Chang, Tong Yu 0001, Zhankui He, Jianing Wang 0002, Yupeng Hou, Julian J. McAuley |
KDD | 3 |
| 2024 | Interact with the Explanations: Causal Debiased Explainable Recommendation SystemabstractIn recent years, the field of recommendation systems has witnessed significant advancements, with explainable recommendation systems gaining prominence as a crucial area of research. These systems aim to enhance user experience by providing transparent and compelling recommendations, accompanied by explanations. However, a persistent challenge lies in addressing biases that can influence the recommendations and explanations offered by these systems. Such biases often stem from a tendency to favor popular items and generate explanations that highlight their common attributes, thereby deviating from the objective of delivering personalized recommendations and explanations. While existing debiasing methods have been applied in explainable recommendation systems, they often overlook the model-generated explanations in tackling biases. Consequently, biases in model-generated explanations may persist, potentially compromising system performance and user satisfaction. Tong Yu 0001, Kaige Xie, Junda Wu, Shuai Li 0010 |
WSDM | 2 |
| 2024 | Which LLM to Play? Convergence-Aware Online Model Selection with Time-Increasing BanditsabstractWeb-based applications such as chatbots, search engines and news recommendations continue to grow in scale and complexity with the recent surge in the adoption of large language models (LLMs). Online model selection has thus garnered increasing attention due to the need to choose the best model among a diverse set while balancing task reward and exploration cost. Organizations faces decisions like whether to employ a costly API-based LLM or a locally finetuned small LLM, weighing cost against performance. Traditional selection methods often evaluate every candidate model before choosing one, which are becoming impractical given the rising costs of training and finetuning LLMs. Moreover, it is undesirable to allocate excessive resources towards exploring poor-performing models. While some recent works leverage online bandit algorithm to manage such exploration-exploitation trade-off in model selection, they tend to overlook the increasing-then-converging trend in model performances as the model is iteratively finetuned, leading to less accurate predictions and suboptimal model selections. Yu Xia 0007, Fang Kong 0002, Tong Yu 0001, Liya Guo, Ryan Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Shuai Li 0010 |
WWW | 3 |
| 2024 | Customizing graph neural networks using path reweighting
Jianpeng Chen, Yujing Wang 0002, Ming Zeng 0009, Zongyi Xiang, Bitan Hou, Tong Yu 0001, Ole J. Mengshoel, Yazhou Ren 0001 |
Inf. Sci. | 6 |
| 2024 | Fairness-Aware Graph Neural Networks: A SurveyabstractGraph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become increasingly important due to their representational power and state-of-the-art predictive performance on many fundamental learning tasks. Despite this success, GNNs suffer from fairness issues that arise as a result of the underlying graph data and the fundamental aggregation mechanism that lies at the heart of the large class of GNN models. In this article, we examine and categorize fairness techniques for improving the fairness of GNNs. We categorize these techniques by whether they focus on improving fairness in the pre-processing, in-processing (during training), or post-processing phases. We discuss how such techniques can be used together whenever appropriate and highlight the advantages and intuition as well. We also introduce an intuitive taxonomy for fairness evaluation metrics, including graph-level fairness, neighborhood-level fairness, embedding-level fairness, and prediction-level fairness metrics. In addition, graph datasets that are useful for benchmarking the fairness of GNN models are summarized succinctly. Finally, we highlight key open problems and challenges that remain to be addressed. April Chen, Ryan Rossi, Namyong Park 0001, Puja Trivedi, Yu Wang 0160, Tong Yu 0001, Sungchul Kim, Franck Dernoncourt, Nesreen K. Ahmed |
ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data | 6 |
| 2024 | Online Learning and Detecting Corrupted Users for Conversational Recommendation SystemsabstractConversational recommendation systems (CRSs) are increasingly prevalent, but they are susceptible to the influence of corrupted user behaviors, such as deceptive click ratings. These behaviors can skew the recommendation process, resulting in suboptimal results. Traditional bandit algorithms, which are typically oriented to single users, do not capitalize on implicit social connections between users, which could otherwise enhance learning efficiency. Furthermore, they cannot identify corrupted users in a real-time, multi-user environment. In this paper, we propose a novel bandit problem, Online Learning and Detecting Corrupted Users (OLDCU), to learn and utilize unknown user relations from disrupted behaviors to speed up learning and detect corrupted users in an online setting. This problem is non-trivial due to the dynamic nature of user behaviors and the difficulty of online detection. To robustly learn and leverage the unknown relations among potentially corrupted users, we propose a novel bandit algorithm RCLUB-WCU, incorporating a conversational mechanism. This algorithm is designed to handle the complexities of disrupted behaviors and to make accurate user relation inferences. To detect corrupted users with bandit feedback, we further devise a novel online detection algorithm, OCCUD, which is based on RCLUB-WCU’s inferred user relations and designed to adapt over time. We prove a sub-linear regret bound for RCLUB-WCU, demonstrating its efficiency. We also analyze the detection accuracy of OCCUD, showing its effectiveness in identifying corrupted users. Through extensive experiments, we validate the performance of our methods. Our results show that RCLUB-WCU and OCCUD outperform previous bandit algorithms and achieve high corrupted user detection accuracy, providing robust and efficient solutions in the field of CRSs. Xiangxiang Dai, Jize Xie, Tong Yu 0001, John C. S. Lui |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 4 |
| 2023 | Interpretable Unsupervised Log Anomaly DetectionabstractModern software systems’ increasing complexity and scale makes it challenging to accurately detect system issues and outages, which have been tackled as an anomaly detection task. Conventionally, such anomalous events barely happen, and annotating them is time-consuming and impractical in big data streams. Even with automated anomaly detection, resolving issues promptly is a remaining challenge that can only be done by providing specific contexts such as root causes, target/affected services, and more. To address these fundamentally important problems, we present Grid Transformer (GT), a framework designed to detect and explain $\log$ anomalies in an unsupervised setting. We first train an Auto-Encoder model to generate pseudo labels. Then, we train the proposed grid transformer that not only predicts anomalies but also generates why a particular instance is an anomaly. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach where it is shown to outperform the other $\log$ anomaly detection models by 20% while also able to generate time-wise and message-wise explanations of the anomalies. Jaeho Bang, Sungchul Kim, Ryan Rossi, Tong Yu 0001, Handong Zhao |
IEEE Big Data | 4 |
| 2023 | User-Regulation Deconfounded Conversational Recommender System with Bandit FeedbackabstractRecent conversational recommender systems (CRSs) have achieved considerable success on addressing the cold-start problem. While they utilize conversational key-terms to efficiently elicit user preferences, most of them, however, neglect that key-terms can also introduce biases. Systems learning key-term-level user preferences may make a biased item recommendation based on an overrated key-term instead of the item itself. As key-term conversation is a crucial part of CRSs, it is important to properly handle such bias resulting from the item-key-term relationship. While many debiasing methods have been proposed for traditional recommender systems, most of them focus on items or item groups re-ranking or re-weighting strategies such as calibration and propensity score, which are not designed to model the relation between item and key-term user preference. There is also no effective way for traditional debiasing methods to measure potentially useful biases through conversational key-terms to enhance the recommendation performance. Yu Xia 0007, Junda Wu, Tong Yu 0001, Sungchul Kim, Ryan Rossi, Shuai Li 0010 |
KDD | 3 |
| 2022 | Hierarchical Conversational Preference Elicitation with Bandit FeedbackabstractThe recent advances of conversational recommendations provide a promising way to efficiently elicit users' preferences via conversational interactions. To achieve this, the recommender system conducts conversations with users, asking their preferences for different items or item categories. Most existing conversational recommender systems for cold-start users utilize a multi-armed bandit framework to learn users' preference in an online manner. However, they rely on a pre-defined conversation frequency for asking about item categories instead of individual items, which may incur excessive conversational interactions that hurt user experience. To enable more flexible questioning about key-terms, we formulate a new conversational bandit problem that allows the recommender system to choose either a key-term or an item to recommend at each round and explicitly models the rewards of these actions. This motivates us to handle a new exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off between key-term asking and item recommendation, which requires us to accurately model the relationship between key-term and item rewards. We conduct a survey and analyze a real-world dataset to find that, unlike assumptions made in prior works, key-term rewards are mainly affected by rewards of representative items. We propose two bandit algorithms, Hier-UCB and Hier-LinUCB, that leverage this observed relationship and the hierarchical structure between key-terms and items to efficiently learn which items to recommend. We theoretically prove that our algorithm can reduce the regret bound's dependency on the total number of items from previous work. We validate our proposed algorithms and regret bound on both synthetic and real-world data. Jinhang Zuo, Songwen Hu, Tong Yu 0001, Shuai Li 0010, Handong Zhao, Carlee Joe-Wong |
CIKM | 3 |
| 2022 | External Knowledge Infusion for Tabular Pre-training Models with Dual-adaptersabstractTabular pre-training models have received increasing attention due to the wide-ranging applications for tabular data analysis. However, most of the existing solutions are directly built upon the tabular data with a mixture of non-semantic and semantic contents. According to the statistics, only 30% of tabular data in wikitables are semantic entities that are surrounded and isolated by enormous irregular characters such as numbers, strings, symbols, etc. Despite the small portion, such semantic entities are crucial for table understanding. This paper attempts to enhance the existing tabular pre-training model by injecting common-sense knowledge from external sources. Compared with the knowledge injection in the natural language pre-training models, the tabular model naturally requires overcoming the domain gaps between external knowledge and tabular data with significant differences in both structures and contents. To this end, we propose the dual-adapters inserted within the pre-trained tabular model for flexible and efficient knowledge injection. The two parallel adapters are trained by the knowledge graph triplets and semantically augmented tables respectively for infusion and alignment with the tabular data. In addition, a path-wise attention layer is attached below to fuse the cross-domain representation with the weighted contribution. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of our proposed knowledge injection framework, we extensively test it on 5 different application scenarios covering both zero-shot and finetuning-based tabular understanding tasks over the cell, column, and tables levels. Can Qin, Sungchul Kim, Handong Zhao, Tong Yu 0001, Ryan Rossi, Yun Fu 0001 |
KDD | 4 |
| 2022 | Bundle MCR: Towards Conversational Bundle RecommendationabstractBundle recommender systems recommend sets of items (e.g., pants, shirt, and shoes) to users, but they often suffer from two issues: significant interaction sparsity and a large output space. In this work, we extend multi-round conversational recommendation (MCR) to alleviate these issues. MCR—which uses a conversational paradigm to elicit user interests by asking user preferences on tags (e.g., categories or attributes) and handling user feedback across multiple rounds—is an emerging recommendation setting to acquire user feedback and narrow down the output space, but has not been explored in the context of bundle recommendation. Zhankui He, Handong Zhao, Tong Yu 0001, Sungchul Kim, Fan Du, Julian J. McAuley |
RecSys | 3 |
| 2022 | Dynamics-Aware Adaptation for Reinforcement Learning Based Cross-Domain Interactive RecommendationabstractInteractive recommender systems (IRS) have received wide attention in recent years. To capture users' dynamic preferences and maximize their long-term engagement, IRS are usually formulated as reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Despite the promise to solve complex decision-making problems, RL-based methods generally require a large amount of online interaction, restricting their applications due to economic considerations. One possible direction to alleviate this issue is cross-domain recommendation that aims to leverage abundant logged interaction data from a source domain (e.g., adventure genre in movie recommendation) to improve the recommendation quality in the target domain (e.g., crime genre). Nevertheless, prior studies mostly focus on adapting the static representations of users/items. Few have explored how the temporally dynamic user-item interaction patterns transform across domains. Junda Wu, Zhihui Xie 0002, Tong Yu 0001, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang 0002, Shuai Li 0010 |
SIGIR | 3 |
| 2022 | FedKC: Federated Knowledge Composition for Multilingual Natural Language UnderstandingabstractMultilingual natural language understanding, which aims to comprehend multilingual documents, is an important task. Existing efforts have been focusing on the analysis of centrally stored text data, but in real practice, multilingual data is usually distributed. Federated learning is a promising paradigm to solve this problem, which trains local models with decentralized data on local clients and aggregates local models on the central server to achieve a good global model. However, existing federated learning methods assume that data are independent and identically distributed (IID), and cannot handle multilingual data, that are usually non-IID with severely skewed distributions: First, multilingual data is stored on local client devices such that there are only monolingual or bilingual data stored on each client. This makes it difficult for local models to know the information of documents in other languages. Second, the distribution over different languages could be skewed. High resource language data is much more abundant than low resource language data. The model trained on such skewed data may focus more on high resource languages but fail to consider the key information of low resource languages. To solve the aforementioned challenges of multilingual federated NLU, we propose a plug-and-play knowledge composition (KC) module, called FedKC, which exchanges knowledge among clients without sharing raw data. Specifically, we propose an effective way to calculate a consistency loss defined based on the shared knowledge across clients, which enables models trained on different clients achieve similar predictions on similar data. Leveraging this consistency loss, joint training is thus conducted on distributed data respecting the privacy constraints. We also analyze the potential risk of FedKC and provide theoretical bound to show that it is difficult to recover data from the corrupted data. We conduct extensive experiments on three public multilingual datasets for three typical NLU tasks, including paraphrase identification, question answering matching, and news classification. The experiment results show that the proposed FedKC can outperform state-of-the-art baselines on the three datasets significantly. Haoyu Wang 0004, Handong Zhao, Yaqing Wang 0001, Tong Yu 0001, Jiuxiang Gu, Jing Gao 0004 |
WWW | 4 |
| 2022 | Knowledge-aware Conversational Preference Elicitation with Bandit FeedbackabstractConversational recommender systems (CRSs) have been proposed recently to mitigate the cold-start problem suffered by the traditional recommender systems. By introducing conversational key-terms, existing conversational recommenders can effectively reduce the need for extensive exploration and elicit the user preferences faster and more accurately. However, existing conversational recommenders leveraging key-terms heavily rely on the availability and quality of the key-terms, and their performances might degrade significantly when the key-terms are incomplete or not well labeled, which usually happens when there are new items being consistently incorporated into the systems and involving lots of human efforts to acquire well-labeled key-terms is costly. Besides, existing CRS methods leverage the feedback to different conversational key-terms separately, without considering the underlying relations between the key-terms. In this case, the learning of the conversational recommenders is sample inefficient, especially when there is a large number of candidate conversational key-terms. Canzhe Zhao, Tong Yu 0001, Zhihui Xie 0002, Shuai Li 0010 |
WWW | 2 |
| 2021 | Clustering of Conversational Bandits for User Preference Learning and ElicitationabstractConversational recommender systems elicit user preference via interactive conversational interactions. By introducing conversational key-terms, existing conversational recommenders can effectively reduce the need for extensive exploration in a traditional interactive recommender. However, there are still limitations of existing conversational recommender approaches eliciting user preference via key-terms. First, the key-term data of the items needs to be carefully labeled, which requires a lot of human efforts. Second, the number of the human labeled key-terms is limited and the granularity of the key-terms is fixed, while the elicited user preference is usually from coarse-grained to fine-grained during the conversations. In this paper, we propose a clustering of conversational bandits algorithm. To avoid the human labeling efforts and automatically learn the key-terms with the proper granularity, we online cluster the items and generate meaningful key-terms for the items during the conversational interactions. Our algorithm is general and can also be used in the user clustering when the feedback from multiple users is available, which further leads to more accurate learning and generations of conversational key-terms. We analyze the regret bound of our learning algorithm. In the empirical evaluations, without using any human labeled key-terms, our algorithm effectively generates meaningful coarse-to-fine grained key-terms and performs as well as or better than the state-of-the-art baseline. Junda Wu, Canzhe Zhao, Tong Yu 0001, Shuai Li 0010 |
CIKM | 3 |
| 2021 | Comparison-based Conversational Recommender System with Relative Bandit FeedbackabstractWith the recent advances of conversational recommendations, the recommender system is able to actively and dynamically elicit user preference via conversational interactions. To achieve this, the system periodically queries users' preference on attributes and collects their feedback. However, most existing conversational recommender systems only enable the user to provide absolute feedback to the attributes. In practice, the absolute feedback is usually limited, as the users tend to provide biased feedback when expressing the preference. Instead, the user is often more inclined to express comparative preferences, since user preferences are inherently relative. To enable users to provide comparative preferences during conversational interactions, we propose a novel comparison-based conversational recommender system. The relative feedback, though more practical, is not easy to be incorporated since its feedback scale is always mismatched with users' absolute preferences. With effectively collecting and understanding the relative feedback from an interactive manner, we further propose a new bandit algorithm, which we call RelativeConUCB. The experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the advantage of our proposed method, compared to the existing bandit algorithms in the conversational recommender systems. Zhihui Xie 0002, Tong Yu 0001, Canzhe Zhao, Shuai Li 0010 |
SIGIR | 2 |
| 2019 | A Visual Dialog Augmented Interactive Recommender SystemabstractTraditional recommender systems rely on user feedback such as ratings or clicks to the items, to analyze the user interest and provide personalized recommendations. However, rating or click feedback are limited in that they do not exactly tell why users like or dislike an item. If a user does not like the recommendations and can not effectively express the reasons via rating and clicking, the feedback from the user may be very sparse. These limitations lead to inefficient model learning of the recommender system. To address these limitations, more effective user feedback to the recommendations should be designed, so that the system can effectively understand a user's preference and improve the recommendations over time. In this paper, we propose a novel dialog-based recommender system to interactively recommend a list of items with visual appearance. At each time, the user receives a list of recommended items with visual appearance. The user can point to some items and describe their feedback, such as the desired features in the items they want in natural language. With this natural language based feedback, the recommender system updates and provides another list of items. To model the user behaviors of viewing, commenting and clicking on a list of items, we propose a visual dialog augmented cascade model. To efficiently understand the user preference and learn the model, exploration should be encouraged to provide more diverse recommendations to quickly collect user feedback on more attributes of the items. We propose a variant of the cascading bandits, where the neural representations of the item images and user feedback in natural language are utilized. In a task of recommending a list of footwear, we show that our visual dialog augmented interactive recommender needs around 41.03% rounds of recommendations, compared to the traditional interactive recommender only relying on the user click behavior. Tong Yu 0001, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin |
KDD | 1 |
| 2018 | SpectralLeader: Online Spectral Learning for Single Topic Models
Tong Yu 0001, Branislav Kveton, Hung Hai Bui, Ole J. Mengshoel |
ECML/PKDD (2) | 1 |
| 2017 | Semi-supervised convolutional neural networks for human activity recognitionabstractLabeled data used for training activity recognition classifiers are usually limited in terms of size and diversity. Thus, the learned model may not generalize well when used in real-world use cases. Semi-supervised learning augments labeled examples with unlabeled examples, often resulting in improved performance. However, the semi-supervised methods studied in the activity recognition literatures assume that feature engineering is already done. In this paper, we lift this assumption and present two semi-supervised methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn discriminative hidden features. Our semi-supervised CNNs learn from both labeled and unlabeled data while also performing feature learning on raw sensor data. In experiments on three real world datasets, we show that our CNNs outperform supervised methods and traditional semi-supervised learning methods by up to 18% in mean F1-score (Fm). Ming Zeng 0009, Tong Yu 0001, Xiao Wang 0040, Le T. Nguyen, Ole J. Mengshoel, Ian Lane |
IEEE BigData | 2 |
| 2017 | QoS-Aware Scheduling of Heterogeneous Servers for Inference in Deep Neural NetworksabstractDeep neural networks (DNNs) are popular in diverse fields such as computer vision and natural language processing. DNN inference tasks are emerging as a service provided by cloud computing environments. However, cloud-hosted DNN inference faces new challenges in workload scheduling for the best Quality of Service (QoS), due to dependence on batch size, model complexity and resource allocation. This paper represents the QoS metric as a utility function of response delay and inference accuracy. We first propose a simple and effective heuristic approach that keeps low response delay and satisfies the requirement on processing throughput. Then we describe an advanced deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach that learns to schedule from experience. The RL scheduler is trained to maximize QoS, using a set of system statuses as the input to the RL policy model. Our approach performs scheduling actions only when there are free GPUs, thus reduces scheduling overhead over common RL schedulers that run at every continuous time step. We evaluate the schedulers on a simulation platform and demonstrate the advantages of RL over heuristics. Tong Yu 0001, Ole J. Mengshoel, Rajesh K. Gupta 0001 |
CIKM | 2 |
| 2017 | Thompson Sampling for Optimizing Stochastic Local Search
Tong Yu 0001, Branislav Kveton, Ole J. Mengshoel |
ECML/PKDD (1) | 1 |
| 2016 | Incremental learning for matrix factorization in recommender systemsabstractRecommender systems play a key role in personalizing service experiences by recommending relevant items to users. One popular technique for producing such personalization at scale is collaborative filtering via Matrix Factorization (MF). The essence of MF is to train a model by factorizing a sparse rating matrix consisting of users' ratings of item. Unfortunately, existing MF methods require model Learning from Scratch when new data (for users, items, or user ratings) arrive. Learning large models from scratch incurs significant computation cost and typically also results in stale recommendations. With increasing amounts of data and a need for real-time recommendations, incremental learning is desirable. In this paper, we develop a novel but simple method for incremental learning of MF models, called One-sided Least Squares, and demonstrate its parallel implementation via Apache Spark. We also describe how to integrate it with batch learning via Alternating Least Squares (ALS). Unlike previous incremental learning methods, we study our method's approximation of the results of ALS, while significantly reducing compute and storage costs. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results on three real-world datasets suggest that One-sided Least Squares achieves prediction accuracy close to Learning from Scratch with ALS at substantially faster learning speeds. This fast and accurate method for incremental learning enables improved Web-scale recommender systems. Tong Yu 0001, Ole J. Mengshoel, Alvin Jude, Eugen Feller, Julien Forgeat, Nimish Radia |
IEEE BigData | 1 |
| 2014 | Big Data Small Footprint: The Design of A Low-Power Classifier for Detecting Transportation ModesabstractSensors on mobile phones and wearables, and in general sensors on IoT (Internet of Things), bring forth a couple of new challenges to big data research. First, the power consumption for analyzing sensor data must be low, since most wearables and portable devices are power-strapped. Second, the velocity of analyzing big data on these devices must be high, otherwise the limited local storage may overflow. This paper presents our hardware-software co-design of a classifier for wearables to detect a person's transportation mode (i.e., still, walking, running, biking, and on a vehicle). We particularly focus on addressing the big-data small-footprint requirement by designing a classifier that is low in both computational complexity and memory requirement. Together with a sensor-hub configuration, we are able to drastically reduce power consumption by 99%, while maintaining competitive mode-detection accuracy. The data used in the paper is made publicly available for conducting research. Meng-Chieh Yu, Tong Yu 0001, Shao-Chen Wang, Chih-Jen Lin, Edward Y. Chang |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 2 |