The rapidly evolving landscape of products, surfaces, policies, and regulations poses significant challenges for deploying state-of-the-art recommendation models at industry scale, primarily due to data fragmentation across domains and escalating infrastructure costs that hinder sustained quality improvements.

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to enhance the performance and efficiency of machine learning models by simultaneously training them on multiple tasks. However, MTL research faces two challenges: 1) effectively modeling the relationships between tasks to enable knowledge sharing, and 2) jointly learning task-specific and shared knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel model called Adaptive Task-to-Task Fusion Network (AdaTT) to address both challenges. AdaTT is a deep fusion network built with task-specific and optional shared fusion units at multiple levels. By leveraging a residual mechanism and a gating mechanism for task-to-task fusion, these units adaptively learn both shared knowledge and task-specific knowledge. To evaluate AdaTT's performance, we conduct experiments on a public benchmark and an industrial recommendation dataset using various task groups. Results demonstrate AdaTT significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, our end-to-end experiments reveal that the model exhibits better performance compared to alternatives.

In many real-world tasks, a canonical “big data” problem is created by combining data from several individual groups or domains. Because test data will likely come from a new group of data, we want to utilize the grouped structure of our training data to enforce generalization between groups of data, not just individual samples. This can be viewed as a multiple-domain generalization problem. Specifically, the goal is to encourage generalization between previously seen labeled source data from multiple domains and unlabeled target domain data. To address this challenge, we introduce Domain-Specific Filter Group (DSFG), where each training domain has a unique filter group and each test data point is predicted by a weighted sum over the outputs of different domain filters. A separate neural network learns to estimate the appropriate filter group weights through a meta-learning strategy. Empirically, experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate improved performance compared to current state-of-the-art approaches.

Query rewriting (QR) is an increasingly important component in voice assistant systems to reduce customer friction caused by errors in a spoken language understanding pipeline. These errors originate from various sources such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) modules. In this work, we construct a user interaction graph from their queries using data mined from a Markov Chain Model [1], and introduce a self-supervised pre-training process for learning query embeddings by leveraging the recent developments in Graph Representation Learning (GRL). We then fine-tune these embeddings with weak supervised data for the query rewriting task, and observe improvement over the neural retrieval baseline system, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

We present a syntax-infused variational autoencoder (SIVAE), that integrates sentences with their syntactic trees to improve the grammar of generated sentences.Distinct from existing VAE-based text generative models, SIVAE contains two separate latent spaces, for sentences and syntactic trees.The evidence lower bound objective is redesigned correspondingly, by optimizing a joint distribution that accommodates two encoders and two decoders.SIVAE works with long shortterm memory architectures to simultaneously generate sentences and syntactic trees.Two versions of SIVAE are proposed: one captures the dependencies between the latent variables through a conditional prior network, and the other treats the latent variables independently such that syntactically-controlled sentence generation can be performed.Experimental results demonstrate the generative superiority of SIVAE on both reconstruction and targeted syntactic evaluations.Finally, we show that the proposed models can be used for unsupervised paraphrasing given different syntactic tree templates.