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With the recent prevalence of Reinforcement Learning (RL), there have been tremendous interests in utilizing RL for online advertising in recommendation platforms (e.g., e-commerce and news feed sites). However, most RL-based advertising algorithms focus on optimizing ads&#39; revenue while ignoring the possible negative influence of ads on user experience of recommended items (products, articles and videos). Developing an optimal advertising algorithm in recommendations faces immense challenges because interpolating ads improperly or too frequently may decrease user experience, while interpolating fewer ads will reduce the advertising revenue. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel advertising strategy for the rec/ads trade-off. To be specific, we develop an RL-based framework that can continuously update its advertising strategies and maximize reward in the long run. Given a recommendation list, we design a novel Deep Q-network architecture that can determine three internally related tasks jointly, i.e., (i) whether to interpolate an ad or not in the recommendation list, and if yes, (ii) the optimal ad and (iii) the optimal location to interpolate. The experimental results based on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

AAAI 2021

DEAR: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Online Advertising Impression in Recommender Systems

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

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AAMAS 2020

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). 

With the recent prevalence of Reinforcement Learning (RL), there have been tremendous interests in utilizing RL for online advertising in recommendation platforms (e.g., e-commerce and news feed sites). However, most RL-based advertising algorithms focus on optimizing ads' revenue while ignoring the possible negative influence of ads on user experience of recommended items (products, articles and videos). Developing an optimal advertising algorithm in recommendations faces immense challenges because interpolating ads improperly or too frequently may decrease user experience, while interpolating fewer ads will reduce the advertising revenue. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel advertising strategy for the rec/ads trade-off. To be specific, we develop an RL-based framework that can continuously update its advertising strategies and maximize reward in the long run. Given a recommendation list, we design a novel Deep Q-network architecture that can determine three internally related tasks jointly, i.e., (i) whether to interpolate an ad or not in the recommendation list, and if yes, (ii) the optimal ad and (iii) the optimal location to interpolate. The experimental results based on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Entity linking (EL) for the rapidly growing short text (e.g. search queries and news titles) is critical to industrial applications. Most existing approaches relying on adequate context for long text EL are not effective for the concise and sparse short text. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Multi-turn Multiple-choice Machine reading comprehension (M3) to solve the short text EL from a new perspective: a query is generated for each ambiguous mention exploiting its surrounding context, and an option selection module is employed to identify the golden entity from candidates using the query. In this way, M3 framework sufficiently interacts limited context with candidate entities during the encoding process, as well as implicitly considers the dissimilarities inside the candidate bunch in the selection stage. In addition, we design a two-stage verifier incorporated into M3 to address the commonly existed unlinkable problem in short text. To further consider the topical coherence and interdependence among referred entities, M3 leverages a multi-turn fashion to deal with mentions in a sequence manner by retrospecting historical cues. Evaluation shows that our M3 framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance on five Chinese and English datasets for the real-world short text EL.

Read, Retrospect, Select: An MRC Framework to Short Text Entity Linking

This paper addresses a new task called referring 3D instance segmentation, which aims to segment out the target instance in a 3D scene given a query sentence. Previous work on scene understanding has explored visual grounding with natural language guidance, yet the emphasis is mostly constrained on images and videos. We propose a Text-guided Graph Neural Network (TGNN) for referring 3D instance segmentation on point clouds. Given a query sentence and the point cloud of a 3D scene, our method learns to extract per-point features and predicts an offset to shift each point toward its object center. Based on the point features and the offsets, we cluster the points to produce fused features and coordinates for the candidate objects. The resulting clusters are modeled as nodes in a Graph Neural Network to learn the representations that encompass the relation structure for each candidate object. The GNN layers leverage each object's features and its relations with neighbors to generate an attention heatmap for the input sentence expression. Finally, the attention heatmap is used to "guide" the aggregation of information from neighborhood nodes. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on referring 3D instance segmentation and 3D localization on ScanRefer, Nr3D, and Sr3D benchmarks, respectively.

Text-Guided Graph Neural Networks for Referring 3D Instance Segmentation

Although AI systems archive a great success in various societal fields, there still exists a challengeable issue of outputting discriminatory results with respect to protected attributes (e.g., gender and age). The popular approach to solving the issue is to remove protected attribute information in the decision process. However, this approach has a limitation that beneficial information for target tasks may also be eliminated. To overcome the limitation, we propose Fairness-aware Disentangling Variational Auto-Encoder (FD-VAE) that disentangles data representation into three subspaces: 1) Target Attribute Latent (TAL), 2) Protected Attribute Latent (PAL), 3) Mutual Attribute Latent (MAL). On top of that, we propose a decorrelation loss that aligns the overall information into each subspace, instead of removing the protected attribute information. After learning the representation, we re-encode MAL to include only target information and combine it with TAL to perform downstream tasks. In our experiments on CelebA and UTK Face datasets, we show that the proposed method mitigates unfairness in facial attribute classification tasks with respect to gender and age. Ours outperforms previous methods by large margins on two standard fairness metrics, equal opportunity and equalized odds.

Learning Disentangled Representation for Fair Facial Attribute Classification via Fairness-Aware information Alignment

Although artificial intelligence has revolutionized data analysis, significantly less work has focused on using AI to improve scientific data collection. Past work in AI for data collection has typically assumed the objective function is well-defined by humans before starting an experiment; however, this is a poor fit for scientific domains where new discoveries and insights are made as data is being collected. In this paper we present a new framework to allow AI systems to work together with humans (e.g. scientists) to collect data more effectively in simple scientific domains. We present a novel algorithm, TESA, which seeks to achieve good performance by learning from past human behavior how to direct data to places that are likely to become scientifically interesting in the future. We analyze the problem theoretically, defining a novel notion of regret in this setting and showing that TESA is zero regret. Next, we show that TESA outperforms other related algorithms in simulations using real data drawn from three diverse domains (economics, mental health, and cognitive psychology). Finally, we run experiments with human subjects across these scientific domains to compare our iterative human-in-the-loop process to a (more standard) workflow in which information is communicated to the AI a priori.

AI-Assisted Scientific Data Collection with Iterative Human Feedback

Lexical relations describe how concepts are semantically related, in the form of relation triples. The accurate prediction of lexical relations between concepts is challenging, due to the sparsity of patterns indicating the existence of such relations. We propose the Knowledge-Enriched Meta-Learning (KEML) framework to address lexical relation classification. In KEML, the LKB-BERT (Lexical Knowledge Base-BERT) model is first presented to learn concept representations from text corpora, with rich lexical knowledge injected by distant supervision. A probabilistic distribution of auxiliary tasks is defined to increase the model's ability to recognize different types of lexical relations. We further propose a neural classifier integrated with special relation recognition cells, in order to combine meta-learning over the auxiliary task distribution and supervised learning for LRC. Experiments over multiple datasets show KEML outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

KEML: A Knowledge-Enriched Meta-Learning Framework for Lexical Relation Classification

We study the price of anarchy (PoA) of simultaneous 2nd price auctions (S2PA) under a new natural condition of no underbidding, meaning that agents never bid on items less than their marginal values.
We establish improved (mostly tight) bounds on the PoA of S2PA under no underbidding for different valuation classes (including unit demand, submodular, XOS, subadditive, and general monotone valuations), in both full information and incomplete information settings. 

To derive our results, we introduce a new parameterized property of auctions, termed (gamma,delta) revenue guaranteed, which implies a PoA of at least gamma/(1+delta). 
Via extension theorems, this guarantee extends to coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) in full information settings, and to Bayesian PoA (BPoA) in settings with incomplete information and arbitrary (correlated) distributions.
We then show that S2PA are (1,1) revenue guaranteed with respect to bids satisfying no underbidding. 
This implies a PoA of at least 1/2 for general monotone valuation, which extends to BPOA with arbitrary correlated distributions.
Moreover, we show that (lambda,mu) smoothness combined with (gamma,delta) revenue guaranteed guarantees a PoA of at least (gamma+lambda)/(1+delta+mu).
This implies a host of results, such as a tight PoA of 2/3 for S2PA with submodular (or XOS) valuations, under no overbidding and no underbidding.
Beyond establishing improved bounds for S2PA, the no underbidding assumption sheds new light on the performance of S2PA relative to 
simultaneous 1st price auctions.

Simultaneous 2nd Price Item Auctions with No-Underbidding

Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) using image-level labels has recently attracted much attention for reducing annotation costs.
Existing WSSS methods utilize localization maps from the classification network to generate pseudo segmentation labels.
However, since localization maps obtained from the classifier focus only on sparse discriminative object regions, it is difficult to generate high-quality segmentation labels.
To address this issue, we introduce discriminative region suppression (DRS) module that is a simple yet effective method to expand object activation regions.
DRS suppresses the attention on discriminative regions and spreads it to adjacent non-discriminative regions, generating dense localization maps.
DRS requires few or no additional parameters and can be plugged into any network.
Furthermore, we introduce an additional learning strategy to give a self-enhancement of localization maps, named localization map refinement learning.
Benefiting from this refinement learning, localization maps are refined and enhanced by recovering some missing parts or removing noise itself.
Due to its simplicity and effectiveness, our approach achieves mIoU 71.4% on the PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation benchmark using only image-level labels.
Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Discriminative Region Suppression for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Meta-learning has been sufficiently validated to be beneficial for low-resource neural machine translation (NMT). However, we find that meta-trained NMT fails to improve the translation performance of the domain unseen at the meta-training stage. In this paper, we aim to alleviate this issue by proposing a novel meta-curriculum learning for domain adaptation in NMT. During meta-training, the NMT first learns the similar curricula from each domain to avoid falling into a bad local optimum early, and finally learns the curricula of individualities to improve the model robustness for learning domain-specific knowledge. Experimental results on 10 different low-resource domains show that meta-curriculum learning can improve the translation performance of both familiar and unfamiliar domains. All the codes and data are freely available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/Meta-Curriculum.

Meta-Curriculum Learning for Domain Adaptation in Neural Machine Translation

Ternary neural networks (TNNs) are potential for network acceleration by reducing the full-precision weights in network to ternary ones, e.g., {-1,0,1}.
However, existing TNNs are mostly calculated based on rule-of-thumb quantization methods by simply thresholding operations, which  causes a significant accuracy loss. In this paper, we introduce a stem-residual framework which provides new  insight into Ternary quantization, termed Residual Quantization (TRQ), to achieve more powerful TNNs. Rather than directly thresholding operations, TRQ recursively performs quantization on full-precision weights for a  refined reconstruction by combining the binarized stem and residual parts. With such a unique quantization process, TRQ  endows the quantizer with high flexibility and precision. Our TRQ is generic, which can be easily extended to multiple bits through recursively encoded residual for  a better recognition accuracy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method yields great recognition accuracy while being accelerated.

TRQ: Ternary Neural Networks with Residual Quantization

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for text generation have recently received many criticisms, as they perform worse than their MLE counterparts. We suspect previous text GANs' inferior performance is due to the lack of a reliable guiding signal in their discriminators. To address this problem, we propose a generative adversarial imitation learning framework for text generation that uses large pre-trained language models to provide more reliable reward guidance. As previous text GANs suffer from high variance of gradients, we apply contrastive discriminator, and proximal policy optimization (PPO) to stabilize and improve text generation performance. For evaluation, we conduct experiments on a diverse set of unconditional and conditional text generation tasks. Experimental results show that TextGAIL achieves better performance in terms of both quality and diversity than the MLE baseline. We also validate our intuition that TextGAIL's discriminator demonstrates the capability of providing reasonable rewards with an additional task.

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Read, Retrospect, Select: An MRC Framework to Short Text Entity Linking

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Sequential Advertising Agent with Interpretable User Hidden Intents

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