Recommender system (RecSys) plays important roles in helping users navigate, discover, and consume massive and highly-dynamic information. Today, many RecSys solutions deployed in the real world rely on categorical user profiles and/or pre-calculated recommendation actions that stay static during a user session. However, recent trends suggest that RecSys need to model user intent in real time and constantly adapt to meet user needs at the moment or change user behavior in situ. There are three primary drivers for this emerging need of online adaptation. First, in order to meet the increasing demand for a better personalized experience, the personalization dimensions and space will grow larger and larger. It would not be feasible to pre-compute recommended actions for all personalization scenarios beyond a certain scale. Second, in many settings the system does not have user prior history to leverage. Estimating user intent in real time is the only way to personalize. As various consumer privacy laws tighten, it is foreseeable that many businesses will reduce their reliance on static user profiles. Therefore, it makes the modeling of user intent in real time an important research topic. Third, a user's intent often changes within a session and between sessions, and user behavior could shift significantly during dramatic events. Therefore, it is important to investigate more on online and adaptive recommender systems (OARS) that can adapt in real time to meet user needs and be robust against distribution shifts. Every year, the organizers survey the most important topics for OARS and propose a new workshop program. In light of the recent advancement of (multi-modal) LLMs in RecSys, in this new edition, we decide to formally add the new topic of (multi-modal) LLM models in OARS. We will invite experts and papers in the field to disseminate new knowledge and foster further advancements.

A fundamental challenge of recommender systems (RS) is understanding the causal dynamics underlying users’ decision making. Most existing literature addresses this problem by using causal structures inferred from domain knowledge. However, there are numerous phenomenons where domain knowledge is insufficient, and the causal mechanisms must be learned from the feedback data. Discovering the causal mechanism from RS feedback data is both novel and challenging, since RS itself is a source of intervention that can influence both the users’ exposure and their willingness to interact. Also for this reason, most existing solutions become inappropriate since they require data collected free from any RS. In this article, we first formulate the underlying causal mechanism as a causal structural model and describe CSL4RS , a general causal structure learning framework for RS grounded in the real-world working mechanism. The essence of our approach is to acknowledge the unknown nature of RS intervention. We then derive the learning objective from our framework and utilize an augmented Lagrangian solver for efficient optimization. We conduct both simulation and real-world experiments to demonstrate how our approach compares favorably to existing solutions, together with the empirical analysis from sensitivity and ablation studies.

Recommender system (RecSys) plays important roles in helping users navigate, discover, and consume massive and highly-dynamic information. Today, many RecSys solutions deployed in the real world rely on categorical user-profiles and/or pre-calculated recommendation actions that stay static during a user session. However, recent trends suggest that RecSys need to model user intent in real time and constantly adapt to meet user needs at the moment or change user behavior in situ. There are three primary drivers for this emerging need of online adaptation. First, in order to meet the increasing demand for a better personalized experience, the personalization dimensions and space will grow larger and larger. It would not be feasible to pre-compute recommended actions for all personalization scenarios beyond a certain scale. Second, in many settings the system does not have user prior history to leverage. Estimating user intent in real time is the only feasible way to personalize. As various consumer privacy laws tighten, it is foreseeable that many businesses will reduce their reliance on static user profiles. Therefore, it makes the modeling of user intent in real time an important research topic. Third, a user's intent often changes within a session and between sessions, and user behavior could shift significantly during dramatic events. Therefore, it is important to investigate more on online and adaptive recommender system (OARS) that can adapt in real time to meet user needs and be robust against distribution shifts. Every year, the organizers survey the most important topics for OARS and propose a new workshop program. In light of the recent advancement of LLMs and foundation models in RecSys, in this new edition, we decide to formally add the new topic of foundation and LLM models in OARS. We will invite experts and papers in the field to facilitate its further advancement. Our workshop offers a focused discussion of the new study and application of OARS, and will bring together an interdisciplinary community of researchers and practitioners from both industry and academia to discuss on new topics in the area, grow a community, and push the direction forward.

Recommender systems (RecSys) play important roles in helping users navigate, discover, and consume large and highly dynamic information. Today, many RecSys solutions deployed in the real world rely on categorical user-profiles and/or pre-calculated recommendation actions that stay static during a user session. However, recent trends suggest that RecSys need to model user intent in real time and constantly adapt to meet user needs at the moment or change user behavior in situ. There are three primary drivers for this emerging need of online adaptation. First, in order to meet the increasing demand for a better personalized experience, the personalization dimensions and space will grow larger and larger. It would not be feasible to pre-compute recommended actions for all personalization scenarios beyond a certain scale. Second, in many settings the system does not have user prior history to leverage. Estimating user intent in real time is the only feasible way to personalize. As various consumer privacy laws tighten, it is foreseeable that many businesses will reduce their reliance on static user profiles. Therefore, it makes the modeling of user intent in real time an important research topic. Third, a user's intent often changes within a session and between sessions, and user behavior could shift significantly during dramatic events. A RecSys should adapt in real time to meet user needs and be robust against distribution shifts. The online and adaptive recommender systems (OARS) workshop offers a focused discussion of the study and application of OARS, and will bring together an interdisciplinary community of researchers and practitioners from both industry and academia. KDD, as the premier data science conference, is an ideal venue to gather leaders in the field to further research into OARS and promote its adoption. This workshop is complementary to several sessions of the main conference (e.g., recommendation, reinforcement learning, etc.) and brings them together using a practical and focused application.

Position bias, the phenomenon whereby users tend to focus on higher-ranked items of the search result list regardless of the actual relevance to queries, is prevailing in many ranking systems. Position bias in training data biases the ranking model, leading to increasingly unfair item rankings, click-through-rate (CTR), and conversion rate (CVR) predictions. To jointly mitigate position bias in both item CTR and CVR prediction, we propose two position-bias-free CTR and CVR prediction models: Position-Aware Click-Conversion (PACC) and PACC via Position Embedding (PACC-PE). PACC is built upon probability decomposition and models position information as a probability. PACC-PE utilizes neural networks to model product-specific position information as embedding. Experiments on the E-commerce sponsored product search dataset show that our proposed models have better ranking effectiveness and can greatly alleviate position bias in both CTR and CVR prediction.

Recent studies on Next-basket Recommendation (NBR) have achieved much progress by leveraging Personalized Item Frequency (PIF) as one of the main features, which measures the frequency of the user’s interactions with the item. However, taking the PIF as an explicit feature incurs bias towards frequent items. Items that a user purchases frequently are assigned higher weights in PIF-based recommender system and appear more frequently in the personalized recommendation list. As a result, the system will lose the fairness and balance between items that the user frequently purchases and items that the user never purchases. We refer to this systematic bias on personalized recommendation lists as frequency bias, which narrows users’ browsing scope and reduces the system utility. We adopt causal inference theory to address this issue. Considering the influence of historical purchases on users’ future interests, the user and item representations can be viewed as unobserved confounders in the causal diagram. In this paper, we propose a deconfounder model named FENDER (Frequency-aware Deconfounder for Next-basket Recommendation) to mitigate the frequency bias. With the deconfounder theory and the causal diagram we propose, FENDER decomposes PIF with a neural tensor layer to obtain substitute confounders for users and items. Then, FENDER performs unbiased recommendations considering the effect of these substitute confounders. Experimental results demonstrate that FENDER has derived diverse and fair results compared to ten baseline models on three datasets while achieving competitive performance. Further experiments illustrate how FENDER balances users’ historical purchases and potential interests.

Time series data is ubiquitous, and accurate time series forecasting is vital for many real-world application domains, including retail, healthcare, supply chain, climate science, e-commerce and economics. Forecasting, in general, has led to broad impact and a diverse range of applications. However, with large-scale, high-dimensional time-series data available, more advanced techniques must be invented or improved for highly accurate predictions. Latest data mining and machine learning techniques play a crucial role in the next generation of forecasting models. In this Applied Machine Learning Methods for Time Series Forecasting (AMLTS) workshop, we focus on effective and accurate latest machine learning approaches to solve various real-world problems. With this workshop's ability to attract audiences across various domains, we invite experienced industrial practitioners and researchers to help uncover new approaches and break new ground in time-series modelings' challenging and vital settings.

Machine learning techniques for developing industry-scale search engines have long been a prominent part of most domains and their online products. Search relevance algorithms are key components of products across different fields, including e-commerce, streaming services, and social networks. In this tutorial, we give an introduction to such large-scale search ranking systems, specifically focusing on deep learning techniques in this area. The topics we cover are the following: (1) Overview of search ranking systems in practice, including classical and machine learning techniques; (2) Introduction to sequential and language models in the context of search ranking; and (3) Knowledge distillation approaches for this area. For each of the aforementioned sessions, we first give an introductory talk and then go over an hands-on tutorial to really hone in on the concepts. We cover fundamental concepts using demos, case studies, and hands-on examples, including the latest Deep Learning methods that have achieved state-of-the-art results in generating the most relevant search results. Moreover, we show example implementations of these methods in python, leveraging a variety of open-source machine-learning/deep-learning libraries as well as real industrial data or open-source data.

Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven their effectiveness for recommender systems. Existing studies have applied GNNs to capture collaborative relations in the data. However, in real-world scenarios, the relations in a recommendation graph can be of various kinds. For example, two movies may be associated either by the same genre or by the same director/actor. If we use a single graph to elaborate all these relations, the graph can be too complex to process. To address this issue, we bring the idea of pre-training to process the complex graph step by step. Based on the idea of divide-and-conquer, we separate the large graph into three sub-graphs: user graph, item graph, and user-item interaction graph. Then the user and item embeddings are pre-trained from user and item graphs, respectively. To conduct pre-training, we construct the multi-relational user graph and item graph, respectively, based on their attributes.In this paper, we propose a novel Reinforced Attentive Multi-relational Graph Neural Network (RAM-GNN) to pre-train user and item embeddings on the user and item graph prior to the recommendation step. Specifically, we design a relation-level attention layer to learn the importance of different relations. Next, a Reinforced Neighbor Sampler (RNS) is applied to search the optimal filtering threshold for sampling top-k similar neighbors in the graph, which avoids the over-smoothing issue. We initialize the recommendation model with the pre-trained user/item embeddings. Finally, an aggregation-based GNN model is utilized to learn from the collaborative relations in the user-item interaction graph and provide recommendations. Our experiments demonstrate that RAM-GNN outperforms other state-of-the-art graph-based recommendation models and multi-relational graph neural networks.

Online Learning to Rank (OL2R) eliminates the need of explicit relevance annotation by directly optimizing the rankers from their interactions with users. However, the required exploration drives it away from successful practices in offline learning to rank, which limits OL2R’s empirical performance and practical applicability. In this work, we propose to estimate a pairwise learning to rank model online. In each round, candidate documents are partitioned and ranked according to the model’s confidence on the estimated pairwise rank order, and exploration is only performed on the uncertain pairs of documents, i.e., divide-and-conquer. Regret directly defined on the number of mis-ordered pairs is proven, which connects the online solution’s theoretical convergence with its expected ranking performance. Comparisons against an extensive list of OL2R baselines on two public learning to rank benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

The problem of basket recommendation (BR) is to recommend a ranking list of items to the current basket. Existing methods solve this problem by assuming the items within the same basket are correlated by one semantic relation, thus optimizing the item embeddings. However, this assumption breaks when there exist multiple intents within a basket. For example, assuming a basket contains {bread, cereal, yogurt, soap, detergent} where {bread, cereal, yogurt} are correlated through the "breakfast" intent, while {soap, detergent} are of "cleaning" intent, ignoring multiple relations among the items spoils the ability of the model to learn the embeddings. To resolve this issue, it is required to discover the intents within the basket. However, retrieving a multi-intent pattern is rather challenging, as intents are latent within the basket. Additionally, intents within the basket may also be correlated. Moreover, discovering a multi-intent pattern requires modeling high-order interactions, as the intents across different baskets are also correlated. To this end, we propose a new framework named as Multi-Intent Translation Graph Neural Network (MITGNN). MITGNN models T intents as tail entities translated from one corresponding basket embedding via T relation vectors. The relation vectors are learned through multi-head aggregators to handle user and item information. Additionally, MITGNN propagates multiple intents across our defined basket graph to learn the embeddings of users and items by aggregating neighbors. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets prove the effectiveness of our proposed model on both transductive and inductive BR. The code1is available online.

E-commerce platforms consistently aim to provide personalized recommendations to drive user engagement, enhance overall user experience, and improve business metrics. Most e-commerce platforms contain multiple carousels on their homepage, each attempting to capture different facets of the shopping experience. Given varied user preferences, optimizing the placement of these carousels is critical for improved user satisfaction. Furthermore, items within a carousel may change dynamically based on sequential user actions, thus necessitating online ranking of carousels. In this work, we present a scalable end-to-end production system to optimally rank item-carousels in real-time on the Walmart online grocery homepage. The proposed system utilizes a novel model that captures the user's affinity for different carousels and their likelihood to interact with previously unseen items. Our system is flexible in design and is easily extendable to settings where page components need to be ranked. We provide the system architecture consisting of a model development phase and an online inference framework. To ensure low-latency, various optimizations across these stages are implemented. We conducted extensive online evaluations to benchmark against the prior experience. In production, our system resulted in an improvement in item discovery, an increase in online engagement, and a significant lift on add-to-carts (ATCs) per visitor on the homepage.

With growing consumer adoption of online grocery shopping through platforms such as Amazon Fresh, Instacart, and Walmart Grocery, there is a pressing business need to provide relevant recommendations throughout the customer journey. In this paper, we introduce a production within-basket grocery recommendation system, RTT2Vec, which generates real-time personalized product recommendations to supplement the user’s current grocery basket. We conduct extensive offline evaluation of our system and demonstrate a 9.4% uplift in prediction metrics over baseline stateof-the-art within-basket recommendation models. We also propose an approximate inference technique 11.6x times faster than exact inference approaches. In production, our system has resulted in an increase in average basket size, improved product discovery, and enabled faster user check-out.

Within-basket recommendation reduces the exploration time of users, where the user's intention of the basket matters. The intent of a shopping basket can be retrieved from both user-item collaborative filtering signals and multi-item correlations. By defining a basket entity to represent the basket intent, we can model this problem as a basket-item link prediction task in the User-Basket-Item (UBI) graph. Previous work solves the problem by leveraging user-item interactions and item-item interactions simultaneously. However, collectivity and heterogeneity characteristics are hardly investigated before. Collectivity defines the semantics of each node which should be aggregated from both directly and indirectly connected neighbors. Heterogeneity comes from multi-type interactions as well as multi-type nodes in the UBI graph. To this end, we propose a new framework named BasConv, which is based on the graph convolutional neural network. Our BasConv model has three types of aggregators specifically designed for three types of nodes. They collectively learn node embeddings from both neighborhood and high-order context. Additionally, the interactive layers in the aggregators can distinguish different types of interactions. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets prove the effectiveness of BasConv.

Big data computing is a process to handle large volumes of information, which typically crosses different functional units in a distributed system. Like any processes involving distributed systems, it has a concern of reliability problems, such as lossy communication links between functional units and crashed computation nodes inside functional units. The paper focuses on resolving this concern in a particular distributed system scenario where the cross-boundary network connections have a high rate of failure and the internal computation nodes are relatively reliable. We propose a pure client side protocol to achieve exactly once message processing which makes big data computing in the above scenario more reliable. Moreover, we optimize the protocol to be more efficient in resource consumption using methods such as machine learning.

With the rise of social networks, large-scale graph analysis becomes increasingly important. Because SQL lacks the expressiveness and performance needed for graph algorithms, lower-level, general-purpose languages are often used instead. For greater ease of use and efficiency, we propose SociaLite, a high-level graph query language based on Datalog. As a logic programming language, Datalog allows many graph algorithms to be expressed succinctly. However, its performance has not been competitive when compared to low-level languages. With SociaLite, users can provide high-level hints on the data layout and evaluation order; they can also define recursive aggregate functions which, as long as they are meet operations, can be evaluated incrementally and efficiently. Moreover, recursive aggregate functions make it possible to implement more graph algorithms that cannot be implemented in Datalog. We evaluated SociaLite by running nine graph algorithms in total; eight for social network analysis (shortest paths, PageRank, hubs and authorities, mutual neighbors, connected components, triangles, clustering coefficients, and betweenness centrality) and one for biological network analysis (Eulerian cycles). We use two real-life social graphs, LiveJournal and Last.fm, for the evaluation as well as one synthetic graph. The optimizations proposed in this paper speed up almost all the algorithms by 3 to 22 times. SociaLite even outperforms typical Java implementations by an average of 50 percent for the graph algorithms tested. When compared to highly optimized Java implementations, SociaLite programs are an order of magnitude more succinct and easier to write. Its performance is competitive, with only 16 percent overhead for the largest benchmark, and 25 percent overhead for the worst case benchmark. Most importantly, being a query language, SociaLite enables many more users who are not proficient in software engineering to perform network analysis easily and efficiently.

With the rise of social networks, large-scale graph analysis becomes increasingly important. Because SQL lacks the expressiveness and performance needed for graph algorithms, lower-level, general-purpose languages are often used instead. For greater ease of use and efficiency, we propose SociaLite, a high-level graph query language based on Datalog. As a logic programming language, Datalog allows many graph algorithms to be expressed succinctly. However, its performance has not been competitive when compared to low-level languages. With SociaLite, users can provide high-level hints on the data layout and evaluation order; they can also define recursive aggregate functions which, as long as they are meet operations, can be evaluated incrementally and efficiently. We evaluated SociaLite by running eight graph algorithms (shortest paths, PageRank, hubs and authorities, mutual neighbors, connected components, triangles, clustering coefficients, and betweenness centrality) on two real-life social graphs, Live-Journal and Last.fm. The optimizations proposed in this paper speed up almost all the algorithms by 3 to 22 times. SociaLite even outperforms typical Java implementations by an average of 50% for the graph algorithms tested. When compared to highly optimized Java implementations, SociaLite programs are an order of magnitude more succinct and easier to write. Its performance is competitive, giving up only 16% for the largest benchmark. Most importantly, being a query language, SociaLite enables many more users who are not proficient in software engineering to make social network queries easily and efficiently.

MOTIVATION: Advances in high-resolution microscopy have recently made possible the analysis of gene expression at the level of individual cells. The fixed lineage of cells in the adult worm Caenorhabditis elegans makes this organism an ideal model for studying complex biological processes like development and aging. However, annotating individual cells in images of adult C.elegans typically requires expertise and significant manual effort. Automation of this task is therefore critical to enabling high-resolution studies of a large number of genes. RESULTS: In this article, we describe an automated method for annotating a subset of 154 cells (including various muscle, intestinal and hypodermal cells) in high-resolution images of adult C.elegans. We formulate the task of labeling cells within an image as a combinatorial optimization problem, where the goal is to minimize a scoring function that compares cells in a test input image with cells from a training atlas of manually annotated worms according to various spatial and morphological characteristics. We propose an approach for solving this problem based on reduction to minimum-cost maximum-flow and apply a cross-entropy-based learning algorithm to tune the weights of our scoring function. We achieve 84% median accuracy across a set of 154 cell labels in this highly variable system. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the automatic annotation of microscopy-based images in adult C.elegans.

We consider a crowdsourcing database system that may cleanse, populate, or filter its data by using human workers. Just like a conventional DB system, such a crowdsourcing DB system requires data manipulation functions such as select, aggregate, maximum, average, and so on, except that now it must rely on human operators (that for example compare two objects) with very different latency, cost and accuracy characteristics. In this paper, we focus on one such function, maximum, that finds the highest ranked object or tuple in a set. In particularm we study two problems: given a set of votes (pairwise comparisons among objects), how do we select the maximum? And how do we improve our estimate by requesting additional votes? We show that in a crowdsourcing DB system, the optimal solution to both problems is NP-Hard. We then provide heuristic functions to select the maximum given evidence, and to select additional votes. We experimentally evaluate our functions to highlight their strengths and weaknesses.

While social interactions are critical to understanding consumer behavior, the relationship between social and commerce networks has not been explored on a large scale. We analyze Taobao, a Chinese consumer marketplace that is the world's largest e-commerce website. What sets Taobao apart from its competitors is its integrated instant messaging tool, which buyers can use to ask sellers about products or ask other buyers for advice. In our study, we focus on how an individual's commercial transactions are embedded in their social graphs. By studying triads and the directed closure process, we quantify the presence of information passing and gain insights into when different types of links form in the network.