Live-streaming services have attracted widespread popularity due to their real-time interactivity and entertainment value. Users can engage with live-streaming authors by participating in live chats, posting likes, or sending virtual gifts to convey their preferences and support. However, the live-streaming services faces serious data-sparsity problem, which can be attributed to the following two points: (1) User's valuable behaviors are usually sparse, e.g., like, comment and gift, which are easily overlooked by the model, making it difficult to describe user's personalized preference. (2) The main exposure content on our platform is short-video, which is 9 times higher than the exposed live-streaming, leading to the inability of live-streaming content to fully model user preference. To this end, we propose a Frequency-Aware Model for Cross-Domain Live-Streaming Recommendation, termed as FARM. Specifically, we first present the intra-domain frequency aware module to enable our model to perceive user's sparse yet valuable behaviors, i.e., high-frequency information, supported by the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). To transfer user preference across the short-video and live-streaming domains, we propose a novel preference align before fuse strategy, which consists of two parts: the cross-domain preference align module to align user preference in both domains with contrastive learning, and the cross-domain preference fuse module to further fuse user preference in both domains using a serious of tailor-designed attention mechanisms. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B testing on Kuaishou live-streaming services demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of FARM. Our FARM has been deployed in online live-streaming services and currently serves hundreds of millions of users on Kuaishou.

Multi-behavior sequential recommendation (MBSR) aims to learn the dynamic and heterogeneous interactions of users' multi-behavior sequences, so as to capture user preferences under target behavior for the next interacted item prediction. Unlike previous methods that adopt unidirectional modeling by mapping auxiliary behaviors to target behavior, recent concerns are shifting from behavior-fixed to behavior-specific recommendation. However, these methods still ignore the user's latent preference that underlying decision-making, leading to suboptimal solutions. Meanwhile, due to the asymmetric deterministic between items and behaviors, discriminative paradigm based on preference scoring is unsuitable to capture the uncertainty from low-entropy behaviors to high-entropy items, failing to provide efficient and diverse recommendation. To address these challenges, we propose FatsMB, a framework based diffusion model that guides preference generation From Behavior-Agnostic To Behavior-Specific in latent spaces, enabling diverse and accurate Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation. Specifically, we design a Multi-Behavior AutoEncoder (MBAE) to construct a unified user latent preference space, facilitating interaction and collaboration across Behaviors, within Behavior-aware RoPE (BaRoPE) employed for multiple information fusion. Subsequently, we conduct target behavior-specific preference transfer in the latent space, enriching with informative priors. A Multi-Condition Guided Layer Normalization (MCGLN) is introduced for the denoising. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. We release our code at https://github.com/OrchidViolet/FatsMB.

We present PushGen, an automated framework for generating high-quality push notifications comparable to human-crafted content. With the rise of generative models, there is growing interest in leveraging LLMs for push content generation. Although LLMs make content generation straightforward and cost-effective, maintaining stylistic control and reliable quality assessment remains challenging, as both directly impact user engagement. To address these issues, PushGen combines two key components: (1) a controllable category prompt technique to guide LLM outputs toward desired styles, and (2) a reward model that ranks and selects generated candidates. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate its effectiveness, which has been deployed in large-scale industrial applications, serving hundreds of millions of users daily.

Live-streaming, as an emerging media enabling real-time interaction between authors and users, has attracted significant attention. Unlike the stable playback time of traditional TV live or the fixed content of short video, live-streaming, due to the dynamics of content and time, poses higher requirements for the recommendation algorithm of the platform - understanding the ever-changing content in real time and push it to users at the appropriate moment. Through analysis, we find that users have a better experience and express more positive behaviors during highlight moments of the live-streaming. Furthermore, since the model lacks access to future content during recommendation, yet user engagement depends on how well subsequent content aligns with their interests, an intuitive solution is to predict future live-streaming content. Therefore, we perform semantic quantization on live-streaming segments to obtain Semantic ids (Sid), encode the historical Sid sequence to capture the author's characteristics, and model Sid evolution trend to enable foresight prediction of future content. This foresight enhances the ranking model through refined features. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which has been deployed on our platform serving hundreds of millions of users every day, bring significant commercial value.

Post-click conversion rate (CVR) estimation is a vital task in many recommender systems of revenue businesses, e.g., e-commerce and advertising. In a perspective of sample, a typical CVR positive sample usually goes through a funnel of exposure?click?conversion. For lack of post-event labels for un-clicked samples, CVR learning task commonly only utilizes clicked samples, rather than all exposed samples as for click-through rate (CTR) learning task. However, during online inference, CVR and CTR are estimated on the same assumed exposure space, which leads to a inconsistency of sample space between training and inference, i.e., sample selection bias (SSB). To alleviate SSB, previous wisdom proposes to design novel auxiliary tasks to enable the CVR learning on un-click training samples, such as CTCVR and counterfactual CVR, etc. Although alleviating SSB to some extent, none of them pay attention to the discrimination between ambiguous negative samples (un-clicked) and factual negative samples (clicked but un-converted) during modelling, which makes CVR model lacks robustness. To full this gap, we propose a novel ChorusCVR model to realize debiased CVR learning in entire-space. We propose a Negative sample Discrimination Module (NDM), which aims to provide robust soft labels with the ability to discriminate factual negative samples (clicked but un-converted) from ambiguous negative samples (un-clicked). Moreover, we propose a Soft Alignment Module (SAM) to supervise CVR learning with several alignment objectives using generated soft labels. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B testing at Kuaishou's e-commerce live service validates our ChorusCVR.

To provide promising recommendation results, there exist three major stages in the industrial RecSys chain to support our service: (1) The first Retrieval model aims at searching hundreds of item candidates. (2) Next, the Ranking model estimates the multiple aspect probabilities Pxtrs for each retrieved item. (3) At last, the Ensemble Sort stage merges those Pxtrs into one comparable score, and then selects the best dozen items with the highest scores to recommend them. To our knowledge, the wide-accepted industry ensemble sort approach still relies on manual formula-based adjustment, i.e., assigning manual weights for Pxtrs to control its influence on fusion score. Under this framework, the RecSys severely relies on expert knowledge to determine satisfactory weight for each Pxtr, which blocks RecSys's further advancements.

In recent years, with the significant evolution of multi-modal large models, many recommender researchers realized the potential of multi-modal information for user interest modeling. In industry, a wide-used modeling architecture is a cascading paradigm: (1) first pre-training a multi-modal model to provide omnipotent representations for downstream services; (2) The downstream recommendation model takes the multi-modal representation as additional input to fit real user-item behaviours. Although such paradigm achieves remarkable improvements, however, there still exist two problems that limit model performance: (1) Representation Unmatching: The pre-trained multi-modal model is always supervised by the classic NLP/CV tasks, while the recommendation models are supervised by real user-item interaction. As a result, the two fundamentally different tasks' goals were relatively separate, and there was a lack of consistent objective on their representations; (2) Representation Unlearning: The generated multi-modal representations are always stored in cache store and serve as extra fixed input of recommendation model, thus could not be updated by recommendation model gradient, further unfriendly for downstream training.

Scaling-law has guided the language model design for past years, e.g., GPTs, enabling the estimation of expected model performance with respect to the size of learnable parameters and the scale of training samples. It is worth noting that the scaling laws of NLP cannot be directly applied to recommendation systems due to the following reasons: (1) The amount of training samples and model parameters is typically not the bottleneck for the model. Our recommendation system can generate over 50 billion user samples daily, and such a massive amount of training data can easily allow our model parameters to exceed 200 billion, surpassing many LLMs (about 100B). (2) It is essential to control FLOPs carefully in recommendation system. In training, we need to process a vast number of recommendation samples every day. During online inference, we must respond within milliseconds (LLMs usually take a few seconds). Considering the above differences with LLM, we can conclude that: for a RecSys model, compared to model parameters, the FLOPs is a more expensive factor that requires careful control.

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) has demon-strated to be an effective solution for alleviating the user cold-start issue. By leveraging rich user-item interactions available in a richly informative source domain, CDR could improve the recommendation performance for cold-start users in the target domain. Previous CDR approaches mostly adhere the Embedding and Mapping (EMCDR) paradigm, which learns a user-shared mapping function to transfer users' preference from the source domain to the target domain, neglecting users' personalized preference. Recent CDR approaches further leverage the meta-learning paradigm, considering the CDR task for each user independently and learning user-specific mapping functions for each user. However, they mostly learn representations for each user individually, which ignores the common preference between different users, neglecting valuable information for CDR. In addition, all these approaches usually summarize the user's preference into an overall representation, which can hardly capture the user's multi-interest preference. To this end, we propose a personalized multi-interest modeling framework for CDR to cold-start users, termed as NF-NPCDR. Specifically, we propose a personalized preference encoder that enhances the neural process (NP) with the normalizing flow (NF) to convert the Gaussian (unimodal) distribution to a multimodal distribution, providing a novel way to capture the user's personalized multi-interest preference. Then, we propose a common preference encoder with a preference pool to capture the common preference between different users. Furthermore, we introduce a stochastic adaptive decoder to incorporate both the personalized and common preference for cold-start users, adaptively modulating both preference for better recommendation. Experimental evalu-ations demonstrate that NF-NPCDR outperforms previous SOTA approaches in five benchmark CDR scenarios.

In this paper, we present the practical problems and the lessons learned at short-video services from Kuaishou. In industry, a widely-used multi-task framework is the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm, which always introduces some shared and specific experts for each task and then uses gate networks to measure related experts' contributions. Although the MoE achieves remarkable improvements, we still observe three anomalies that seriously affect model performances in our iteration: (1) Expert Collapse: We found that experts' output distributions are significantly different, and some experts have over 90% zero activations with ReLU, making it hard for gate networks to assign fair weights to balance experts. (2) Expert Degradation: Ideally, the shared-expert aims to provide predictive information for all tasks simultaneously. Nevertheless, we find that some shared-experts are occupied by only one task, which indicates that shared-experts lost their ability but degenerated into some specific-experts. (3) Expert Underfitting: In our services, we have dozens of behavior tasks that need to be predicted, but we find that some data-sparse prediction tasks tend to ignore their specific-experts and assign large weights to shared-experts. The reason might be that the shared-experts can perceive more gradient updates and knowledge from dense tasks, while specific-experts easily fall into underfitting due to their sparse behaviors.

Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) is a hot topic in sequence-based user interest modeling, which aims at utilizing a single model to predict the next items for different domains. To tackle the CDSR, many methods are focused on domain overlapped users’ behaviors fitting, which heavily relies on the same user’s different-domain item sequences collaborating signals to capture the synergy of cross-domain item-item correlation. Indeed, these overlapped users occupy a small fraction of the entire user set only, which introduces a strong assumption that the small group of domain overlapped users is enough to represent all domain user behavior characteristics. However, intuitively, such a suggestion is biased, and the insufficient learning paradigm in non-overlapped users will inevitably limit model performance. Further, it is not trivial to model non-overlapped user behaviors in CDSR because there are no other domain behaviors to collaborate with, which causes the observed single-domain users’ behavior sequences to be hard to contribute to cross-domain knowledge mining. Considering such a phenomenon, we raise a challenging and unexplored question: How to unleash the potential of non-overlapped users’ behaviors to empower CDSR? To this end, we propose a novel CDSR framework with Neural Processes (NP), briefly termed CDSRNP, where NP combines the advantages of meta-learning and stochastic processes. As a meta-learning based method, we first sample some observed overlapped users’ behaviors as the support set to empower query users’ prediction. Next, we employ the NP principle to align the cross-domain correlation prior/posterior distributions generated by support/query user sets, thus the query user (e.g., non-overlapped user) behaviors sequence could also establish a straight bridge to connect other domain items. Additionally, we design a fine-grained interest adaptive layer to identify the users’ interests to enhance prediction. Experimental results illustrate that CDSRNP1 outperforms state-of-the-art methods in two real-world datasets.

In real-world applications, users express different behaviors when they interact with different items, including implicit click/like interactions, and explicit comments/reviews interactions. Nevertheless, almost all recommender works are focused on how to describe user preferences by the implicit click/like interactions, to find the synergy of people. For the content-based explicit comments/reviews interactions, some works attempt to utilize them to mine the semantic knowledge to enhance recommender models. However, they still neglect the following two points: (1) The content semantic is a universal world knowledge; how do we extract the multi-aspect semantic information to empower different domains? (2) The user/item ID feature is a fundamental element for recommender models; how do we align the ID and content semantic feature space? In this paper, we propose a 'plugin' semantic knowledge transferring method LoID, which includes two major components: (1) LoRA-based large language model pretraining to extract multi-aspect semantic information; (2) ID-based contrastive objective to align their feature spaces. We conduct extensive experiments with SOTA baselines to demonstrate superiority of our method LoID.

Short video has witnessed rapid growth in the past few years in multimedia platforms. To ensure the freshness of the videos, platforms receive a large number of user-uploaded videos every day, making collaborative filtering-based recommender methods suffer from the item cold-start problem (e.g., the new-coming videos are difficult to compete with existing videos). Consequently, increasing efforts tackle the cold-start issue from the content perspective, focusing on modeling the multi-modal preferences of users, a fair way to compete with new-coming and existing videos. However, recent studies ignore the existing gap between multi-modal embedding extraction and user interest modeling as well as the discrepant intensities of user preferences for different modalities. In this paper, we propose M3CSR, a multi-modal modeling framework for cold-start short video recommendation. Specifically, we preprocess content-oriented multi-modal features for items and obtain trainable category IDs by performing clustering. In each modality, we combine modality-specific cluster ID embedding and the mapped original modality feature as modality-specific representation of the item to address the gap. Meanwhile, M3CSR measures the user modality-specific intensity based on the correlation between modality-specific interest and behavioral interest and employs pairwise loss to further decouple user multi-modal interests. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model. The framework has been deployed on a billion-user scale short video application and has shown improvements in various commercial metrics within cold-start scenarios.

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) has been proven as a promising way to tackle the user cold-start problem, which aims to make recommendations for users in the target domain by transferring the user preference derived from the source domain. Traditional CDR studies follow the embedding and mapping (EMCDR) paradigm, which transfers user representations from the source to target domain by learning a user-shared mapping function, neglecting the user-specific preference. Recent CDR studies attempt to learn user-specific mapping functions in meta-learning paradigm, which regards each user's CDR as an individual task, but neglects the preference correlations among users, limiting the beneficial information for user representations. Moreover, both of the paradigms neglect the explicit user-item interactions from both domains during the mapping process. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a novel CDR framework with neural process (NP), termed as CDRNP. Particularly, it develops the meta-learning paradigm to leverage user-specific preference, and further introduces a stochastic process by NP to capture the preference correlations among the overlapping and cold-start users, thus generating more powerful mapping functions by mapping the user-specific preference and common preference correlations to a predictive probability distribution. In addition, we also introduce a preference remainer to enhance the common preference from the overlapping users, and finally devises an adaptive conditional decoder with preference modulation to make prediction for cold-start users with items in the target domain. Experimental results demonstrate that CDRNP outperforms previous SOTA methods in three real-world CDR scenarios.

This paper studies the multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) and multimodal relation extraction (MRE), which are important for content analysis and various applications. The core of MNER and MRE lies in incorporating evident visual information to enhance textual semantics, where two issues inherently demand investigations. The first issue is modality-noise, where the task-irrelevant information in each modality may be noises misleading the task prediction. The second issue is modality-gap, where representations from different modalities are inconsistent, preventing from building the semantic alignment between the text and image. To address these issues, we propose a novel method for MNER and MRE byMultiModal representation learning withInformationBottleneck (MMIB). For the first issue, a refinement-regularizer probes the information-bottleneck principle to balance the predictive evidence and noisy information, yielding expressive representations for prediction. For the second issue, an alignment-regularizer is proposed, where a mutual information-based item works in a contrastive manner to regularize the consistent text-image representations. To our best knowledge, we are the first to explore variational IB estimation for MNER and MRE. Experiments show that MMIB achieves the state-of-the-art performances on three public benchmarks.

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has recently achieved substantial advancements. Existing GCL approaches compare two different “views“ of the same graph in order to learn node/graph representations. The underlying assumption of these studies is that the graph augmentation strategy is capable of generating several different graph views such that the graph views are structurally different but semantically similar to the original graphs, and thus the ground-truth labels of the original and augmented graph/nodes can be regarded identical in contrastive learning. However, we observe that this assumption does not always hold. For instance, the deletion of a supernode within a social network can exert a substantial influence on the partitioning of communities for other nodes. Similarly, any perturbation to nodes or edges in a molecular graph will change the labels of the graph. Therefore, we believe that augmenting the graph, accompanied by an adaptation of the labels used for the contrastive loss, will facilitate the encoder to learn a better representation. Based on this idea, we propose ID-MixGCL, which allows the simultaneous interpolation of input nodes and corresponding identity labels to obtain soft-confidence samples, with a controllable degree of change, leading to the capture of fine-grained representations from self-supervised training on unlabeled graphs. Experimental results demonstrate that ID-MixGCL improves performance on graph classification and node classification tasks, as demonstrated by significant improvements on the Cora, IMDB-B, IMDB-M, and PROTEINS datasets compared to state-of-the-art techniques, by 3-29parcent absolute points. The dataset and source code can be found at: https://github.com/zhanggehang/ID-MIXGCL.

Document-level event factuality identification (DocEFI) is an important task in event knowledge acquisition, which aims to detect whether an event actually occurs or not from the perspective of the document. Unlike the sentence-level task, a document can have multiple sentences with different event factualities, leading to event factuality conflicts in DocEFI. Existing studies attempt to aggregate local event factuality by exploiting document structures, but they mostly consider textual components in the document separately, degrading complicated correlations therein. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a novel approach, namely UR-HAT, to improve DocEFI with uncertain relational hypergraph attention networks. Particularly, we reframe a document graph as a hypergraph, and establish beneficial n-ary correlations among textual nodes with relational hyperedges, which helps to globally consider local factuality features to resolve event factuality conflicts. To better discern the importance of event factuality features, we further represent textual nodes with uncertain Gaussian distributions, and propose novel uncertain relational hypergraph attention networks to refine textual nodes with the document hypergraph. In addition, we select factuality-related keywords as nodes to enrich event factuality features. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, and outperforms previous methods on two widely used benchmark datasets.

Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to address the challenge of data scarcity in low-resource languages by leveraging knowledge from high-resource languages. Most current work relies on general multilingual language models to represent text, and then uses classic combined tagging (e.g., B-ORG) to annotate entities; However, this approach neglects the lack of cross-lingual alignment of entity representations in language models, and also ignores the fact that entity spans and types have varying levels of labeling difficulty in terms of transferability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, referred to as DLBri, which addresses the issues of representation and labeling simultaneously. Specifically, the proposed framework utilizes progressive contrastive learning with source-to-target oriented sentence pairs to pre-finetune the language model, resulting in improved cross-lingual entity-aware representations. Additionally, a decomposition-then-combination procedure is proposed, which separately transfers entity span and type, and then combines their information, to reduce the difficulty of cross-lingual entity labeling. Extensive experiments on 13 diverse language pairs confirm the effectiveness of DLBri.

In industry, web platforms such as Alibaba and Amazon often provide diverse services for users. Unsurprisingly, some developed services are data-rich, while some newly started services are data-scarce accompanied by severe data sparsity and cold-start problems. To alleviate the above problems and incubate new services easily, cross-domain recommendation (CDR) has attracted much attention from industrial and academic researchers. Generally, CDR aims to transfer rich user-item interaction information from related source domains (e.g., developed services) to boost recommendation quality of target domains (e.g., newly started services). For different scenarios, previous CDR methods can be roughly divided into two branches: (1) Data sparsity CDR fulfills user preference aided by other domain data to make intra-domain recommendations for users with few interactions, (2) Cold-start CDR projects user preference from other domain to make inter-domain recommendations for users with none interactions. In the past years, many outstanding CDR methods are emerged, however, to the best of our knowledge, none of them attempts to solve the two branches simultaneously. In this paper, we provide a unified framework, namely UniCDR, which can universally model different CDR scenarios by transferring the domain-shared information. Extensive experiments under the above 2 branches on 4 CDR scenarios and 6 public and large-scale industrial datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and universal ability of our UniCDR.

Data sparsity has been a long-standing issue for accurate and trustworthy recommendation systems (RS). To alleviate the problem, many researchers pay much attention to cross-domain recommendation (CDR), which aims at transferring rich knowledge from related source domains to enhance the recommendation performance of sparse target domain. To reach the knowledge transferring purpose, recent CDR works always focus on designing different pairwise directed or undirected information transferring strategies between source and target domains. However, such pairwise transferring idea is difficult to adapt to multi-target CDR scenarios directly, e.g., transferring knowledge between multiple domains and improving their performance simultaneously, as such strategies may lead the following issues: (1) When the number of domains increases, the number of transferring modules will grow exponentially, which causes heavy computation complexity. (2) A single pairwise transferring module could only capture the relevant information of two domains, but ignores the correlated information of other domains, which may limit the transferring effectiveness. (3) When a sparse domain serves as the source domain during the pairwise transferring, it would easily leads the negative transfer problem, and the untrustworthy information may hurt the target domain recommendation performance. In this article, we consider the key challenge of the multi-target CDR task: How to identify the most valuable trustworthy information over multiple domains and transfer such information efficiently to avoid the negative transfer problem? To fulfill the above challenge, we propose a novel end-to-end model termed as DR-MTCDR , standing for D isentangled R epresentations learning for M ulti- T arget CDR . DR-MTCDR aims at transferring the trustworthy domain-shared information across domains, which has the two major advantages in both efficiency and effectiveness: (1) For efficiency, DR-MTCDR utilizes a unified module on all domains to capture disentangled domain-shared information and domain-specific information, which could support all domain recommendation and be insensitive to the number of domains. (2) For effectiveness, based on the disentangled domain-shared and domain-specific information, DR-MTCDR has the capability to lead positive effect and make trustworthy recommendation for each domain. Empirical evaluations on datasets from both public datasets and real-world large-scale financial datasets have shown that the proposed framework outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines.

Yanzeng Li, Jiangxia Cao, Xin Cong, Zhenyu Zhang, Bowen Yu, Hongsong Zhu, Tingwen Liu. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2022.

Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) aims to predict future interactions based on user's historical sequential interactions from multiple domains. Generally, a key challenge of CDSR is how to mine precise cross-domain user preference based on the intra-sequence and inter-sequence item interactions. Existing works first learn single-domain user preference only with intra-sequence item interactions, and then build a transferring module to obtain cross-domain user preference. However, such a pipeline and implicit solution can be severely limited by the bottleneck of the designed transferring module, and ignores to consider inter-sequence item relationships.

Recommender systems have been widely deployed in many real-world applications, but usually suffer from the long-standing user cold-start problem. As a promising way, Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has attracted a surge of inter-est, which aims to transfer the user preferences observed in the source domain to make recommendations in the target domain. Previous CDR approaches mostly achieve the goal by following the Embedding and Mapping (EMCDR) idea which attempts to learn a mapping function to transfer the pre-trained user repre-sentations (embeddings) from the source domain into the target domain. However, they pre-train the user/item representations independently for each domain, ignoring to consider both domain interactions simultaneously. Therefore, the biased pre-trained representations inevitably involve the domain-specific information which may lead to negative impact to transfer information across domains. In this work, we consider a key point of the CDR task: what information needs to be shared across domains? To achieve the above idea, this paper utilizes the information bottleneck (IB) principle, and proposes a novel approach termed as CDRIB to enforce the representations encoding the domain-shared information. To derive the unbiased representations, we devise two IB regularizers to model the cross-domain/in-domain user-item interactions simultaneously and thereby CDRIB could consider both domain interactions jointly for de-biasing. With an additional contrastive information regularizer, CDRIB can also capture cross-domain user-user correlations. In this way, those regularizers encourage the representations to encode the domain-shared information, which has the capability to make recommendations in both domains directly. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to capture the domain-shared information for cold-start users via variational information bottleneck. Empirical experiments illustrate that CDRIB outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on four real-world cross-domain datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of adopting the information bottleneck for CDR.

Real-world web applications such as Amazon and Netflix often provide services in multiple countries and regions (i.e., markets) around the world. Generally, different markets share similar item sets while containing different amounts of interaction data. Some markets are data-scarce and others are data-rich and leveraging those data from similar and data-rich auxiliary markets could enhance the data-scarce markets. In this paper, we explore multi-market recommendation (MMR), and propose a novel model called M$^3$Rec to improve all markets recommendation simultaneously. Since items play the role to bridge different markets, we argue that mining the similarities among items is the key point of MMR. Our M^3Rec preprocess two global item similarities: intra- and inter- market similarities. Specifically, we first learn the second-order intra-market similarity by adopting linear models with closed-form solutions, and then capture the high-order inter-market similarity by the random walk. Afterward, we incorporate the global item similarities for each local market. We conduct extensive experiments on five public available markets and compare with several state-of-the-art methods. Detailed experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Data sparsity is a long-standing problem in recommender systems. To alleviate it, Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has attracted a surge of interests, which utilizes the rich user-item interaction information from the related source domain to improve the performance on the sparse target domain. Recent CDR approaches pay attention to aggregating the source domain information to generate better user representations for the target domain. However, they focus on designing more powerful interaction encoders to learn both domains simultaneously, but fail to model different user preferences of different domains. Particularly, domain-specific preferences of the source domain usually provide useless information to enhance the performance in the target domain, and directly aggregating the domain-shared and domain-specific information together maybe hurts target domain performance. This work considers a key challenge of CDR: How do we transfer shared information across domains? Grounded in the information theory, we propose DisenCDR, a novel model to disentangle the domain-shared and domain-specific information. To reach our goal, we propose two mutual-information-based disentanglement regularizers. Specifically, an exclusive regularizer aims to enforce the user domain-shared representations and domain-specific representations encoding exclusive information. An information regularizer is to encourage the user domain-shared representations encoding predictive information for both domains. Based on them, we further derive a tractable bound of our disentanglement objective to learn desirable disentangled representations. Extensive experiments show that DisenCDR achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines on four real-world datasets.

Event detection (ED) is a pivotal task for information retrieval, which aims at identifying event triggers and classifying them into pre-defined event types. In real-world applications, events are usually annotated with numerous fine-grained types, which often arises long-tail type nature and co-occurrence event nature. Existing studies explore the event correlations without full utilization, which may limit the capability of event detection. This paper simultaneously incorporates both the type-level and instance-level event correlations, and proposes a novel framework, termed as CorED. Specifically, we devise an adaptive graph-based type encoder to capture instance-level correlations, learning type representations not only from their training data but also from their relevant types, thus leading to more informative type representations especially for the low-resource types. Besides, we devise an instance interactive decoder to capture instance-level correlations, which predicts event instance types conditioned on the contextual typed event instances, leveraging co-occurrence events as remarkable evidence in prediction. We conduct experiments on two public benchmarks, MAVEN and ACE-2005 dataset. Empirical results demonstrate the unity of both type-level and instance-level correlations, and the model achieves effectiveness performance on both benchmarks.

Multivariate Hawkes processes (MHPs) are classic methods to learn temporal patterns in event sequences of different entities. Traditional MHPs with explicit parametric intensity functions are friendly to model interpretability. However, recent Deep MHPs which employ various variants of recurrent neural networks are hardly to understand, albeit more expressive towards event sequences. The lack of model interpretability of Deep MHPs leads to a limited comprehension of complicated dynamics between events. To this end, we present a new Disentangled Deep Multivariate Hawkes Process $(\mathrm{D}^{2}$ MHP) to enhance model expressiveness and meanwhile maintain model interpretability. $\mathrm{D}^{2}$ MHP achieves state disentanglement by disentangling the latent representation of an event sequence into static and dynamic latent variables, and matches these latent variables to interpretable factors in the intensity function. Moreover, considering that an entity typically has multiple identities, $\mathrm{D}^{2}$ MHP further splits these latent variables into factorized representations, each of which is associated with a corresponding identity. Experiments on real-world datasets show that $\mathrm{D}^{2}$ MHP yields significant and consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines. We also demonstrate model interpretability via the detailed analysis.

Bipartite graph embedding has recently attracted much attention due to the fact that bipartite graphs are widely used in various application domains. Most previous methods, which adopt random walk-based or reconstruction-based objectives, are typically effective to learn local graph structures. However, the global properties of bipartite graph, including community structures of homogeneous nodes and long-range dependencies of heterogeneous nodes, are not well preserved. In this paper, we propose a bipartite graph embedding called BiGI to capture such global properties by introducing a novel local-global infomax objective. Specifically, BiGI first generates a global representation which is composed of two prototype representations. BiGI then encodes sampled edges as local representations via the proposed subgraph-level attention mechanism. Through maximizing the mutual information between local and global representations, BiGI enables nodes in bipartite graph to be globally relevant. Our model is evaluated on various benchmark datasets for the tasks of top-K recommendation and link prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BiGI achieves consistent and significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines. Detailed analyses verify the high effectiveness of modeling the global properties of bipartite graph.