Canada

We present a modular recommender system framework that tightly integrates yet maintains the independence of individual components, thus satisfying two of the most critical aspects of industrial applications, generality and specificity. On the one hand, we ensure that each component remains self-contained and is ready to serve in other applications beyond recommender systems. On the other hand, when these components are combined, a unified theme emerges for recommender systems. We present the details of each component in the context of recommender systems and other applications. We release each component as an open-source library, and most importantly, we release their integration under MAB2REC, an industry-strength open-source software for building bandit-based recommender systems. By bringing standalone components together, Mab2Rec realizes a powerful and scalable toolchain to build and deploy business-relevant personalization applications. Finally, we share our experience and best practices for user training, adoption, performance evaluation, deployment, and model governance within the enterprise and the broader community.

AAAI 2024

Building Higher-Order Abstractions from the Components of Recommender Systems | VIDEO

fairness and performance evaluation

sequential pattern mining

contextual multi-armed bandits

open-source software

text featurization

feature selection

recommender systems

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Azure Core workload insights have time-series data with different metric units. Faults or Anomalies are observed in these time-series data owing to faults observed with respect to metric name, resources region, dimensions, and its dimension value associated with the data. For Azure Core, an important task is to highlight faults or anomalies to the user on a dashboard that they can perceive easily. The number of anomalies reported should be highly significant and in a limited number, e.g., 5-20 anomalies reported per hour. The reported anomalies will have significant user perception and high reconstruction error in any time-series forecasting model. Hence, our task is to automatically identify 'high significant anomalies' and their associated information for user perception.

High Significant Fault Detection in Azure Core Workload Insights | VIDEO

Image collection summarization techniques aim to present a compact representation of an image gallery through a carefully selected subset of images that captures its semantic content. When it comes to web content, however, the ideal selection can vary based on the user's specific intentions and preferences. This is particularly relevant at Booking.com, where presenting properties and their visual summaries that align with users' expectations is crucial. To address this challenge, in this work, we consider user intentions in the summarization of property visuals by analyzing property reviews and extracting the most significant aspects mentioned by users. By incorporating the insights from reviews in our visual summaries, we enhance the summaries by presenting the relevant content to a user. Moreover, we achieve it without the need for costly annotations. Our experiments, including human perceptual studies, demonstrate the superiority of our cross-modal approach, which we coin as CrossSummarizer over the no-personalization and image-based clustering baselines.

Tell Me What Is Good about This Property: Leveraging Reviews for Segment-Personalized Image Collection Summarization

Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) have been proposed, advocated, and generated for more than 25 years. Although ETDs are hosted by commercial or institutional digital library repositories, they are still an understudied type of scholarly big data, partially because they are usually longer than conference and journal papers. Segmenting ETDs will allow researchers to study sectional content. Readers can navigate to particular pages of interest, to discover and explore the content buried in these long documents. Most existing frameworks on document page classification are designed for classifying general documents, and perform poorly on ETDs. In this paper, we propose ETDPC. Its backbone is a two-stream multimodal model with a cross-attention network to classify ETD pages into 13 categories. To overcome the challenge of imbalanced labeled samples, we augmented data for minority categories and employed a hierarchical classifier. ETDPC outperforms the state-of-the-art models in all categories, achieving an F1 of 0.84 -- 0.96 for 9 out of 13 categories. We also demonstrated its data efficiency. The code and data can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/lamps-lab/ETDMiner/tree/master/etd_segmentation).

ETDPC: A Multimodality Framework for Classifying Pages in Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Building teams and promoting collaboration  are two very common business activities. An example of these are seen in the TeamingForFunding problem, where research institutions and researchers are interested to identify collaborative opportunities when applying to funding agencies in response to latter's calls for proposals. We describe a novel deployed system to recommend teams using a variety of AI methods, such that (1) each team achieves the highest possible  skill coverage that is demanded by the opportunity, and (2) the workload of distributing the opportunities is balanced amongst the candidate members. We address these questions by extracting skills latent in open data of proposal calls (demand) and researcher profiles (supply), normalizing them using taxonomies, and creating efficient algorithms that match demand to supply. We create teams to maximize goodness along a novel metric balancing short- and long-term objectives. We validate the success of our algorithms (1) quantitatively, by evaluating the recommended teams using a goodness score and find that more informed methods lead to recommendations of smaller number of teams but higher goodness, and (2) qualitatively, by conducting a large-scale user study at a college-wide level, and demonstrate that users overall found the tool very useful and relevant. Lastly, we evaluate our system in two diverse settings in US and India (of researchers and proposal calls) to establish generality of our approach, and deploy it at a major US university for routine use.

Promoting Research Collaboration with Open Data Driven Team Recommendation in Response to Call for Proposals

The widespread adoption of public and hybrid clouds, along with elastic resources and various automation tools for dynamic deployment, has accelerated the rapid provisioning of compute resources as needed. Despite these advancements, numerous resources persist unnecessarily due to factors such as poor digital hygiene, risk aversion, or the absence of effective tools, resulting in substantial costs and energy consumption. Existing threshold-based techniques prove inadequate in effectively addressing this challenge. To address this issue, we propose an unsupervised machine learning framework to automatically identify resources that can be de-provisioned completely or summoned on a schedule. Application of this approach to enterprise data has yielded promising initial results, facilitating the segregation of productive workloads with recurring demands from non-productive ones.

Optimizing IT FinOps and Sustainability through Unsupervised Workload Characterization

In the field of finance, the underwriting process is an essential step in evaluating every loan application. During this stage, the borrowers' creditworthiness and ability to repay the loan are assessed to ultimately decide whether to approve the loan application. One of the core components of underwriting is credit scoring, in which the probability of default is estimated. 
As such, there has been significant progress in enhancing the predictive accuracy of credit scoring models through the use of machine learning, but there still exists a need to ultimately construct an approval rule that takes into consideration additional criteria beyond the score itself. This construction process is traditionally done manually to ensure that the approval rule remains interpretable to humans.
In this paper, we outline an automated system for optimizing a rule-based system for approving loan applications, which has been deployed at Hyundai Capital Services (HCS). The main challenge lay in creating a high-quality rule base that is simultaneously simple enough to be interpretable by  risk analysts as well as customers, since the approval decision should be accountable. We addressed this challenge through principled submodular optimization. The deployment of our system has led to a 14% annual growth in the volume of loan services at HCS, while maintaining the target bad rate, and has resulted in the approval of customers who might have otherwise been rejected.

A Submodular Optimization Approach to Accountable Loan Approval

Accurate identification of protein nucleic-acid-binding residues poses a significant challenge with important implications for various biological processes and drug design. Many typical computational methods for protein analysis rely on a single model that could ignore either the semantic context of the protein or the global 3D geometric information. Consequently, these approaches may result in incomplete or inaccurate protein analysis. To address the above issue, in this paper, we present CrossBind, a novel collaborative cross-modal approach for identifying binding residues by exploiting both protein geometric structure and its sequence prior knowledge extracted from a large-scale protein language model. Specifically, our multi-modal approach leverages a contrastive learning technique and atom-wise attention to capture the positional relationships between atoms and residues, thereby incorporating fine-grained local geometric knowledge, for better binding residue prediction. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the next best state-of-the-art methods, GraphSite and GraphBind, on DNA and RNA datasets by 10.8/17.3% in terms of the harmonic mean of precision and recall (F1-Score) and 11.9/24.8% in Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), respectively.

CrossBind: Collaborative Cross-Modal Identification of Protein Nucleic-Acid-Binding Residues

Optimal control deals with optimization problems in which variables steer a
dynamical system, and its outcome contributes to the objective function. Two
classical approaches to solving these problems are Dynamic Programming
and the Pontryagin Maximum Principle. In both approaches, Hamiltonian
equations offer an interpretation of optimality through auxiliary variables
known as costates. However, Hamiltonian equations are rarely used due
to their reliance on forward-backward algorithms across the entire temporal
domain.  This paper introduces a novel neural-based approach to optimal
control. Neural networks are employed not only for implementing state
dynamics but also for estimating costate variables. The parameters of the
latter network are determined at each time step using a newly introduced
local policy referred to as the time-reversed generalized
Riccati equation. This policy is inspired by a result discussed in the
Linear Quadratic (LQ) problem, which we conjecture stabilizes state
dynamics. We support this conjecture by discussing experimental results from
a range of optimal control case studies.

Neural Time-Reversed Generalized Riccati Equation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive planning abilities due to their vast "world knowledge". Yet, obtaining plans that are both feasible (grounded in affordances) and cost-effective (in plan length), remains a challenge, despite recent progress. This contrasts with heuristic planning methods that employ domain knowledge (formalized in action models such as PDDL) and heuristic search to generate feasible, optimal plans. Inspired by this, we propose to combine the power of LLMs and heuristic planning by leveraging the world knowledge of LLMs and the principles of heuristic search. Our approach, SayCanPay, employs LLMs to generate actions (Say) guided by learnable domain knowledge, that evaluates actions' feasibility (Can) and long-term reward/payoff (Pay), and heuristic search to select the best sequence of actions. Our contributions are (1) a novel framing of the LLM planning problem in the context of heuristic planning, (2) integrating grounding and cost-effective elements into the generated plans, and (3) using heuristic search over actions. Our extensive evaluations show that our model surpasses other LLM planning approaches.

SayCanPay: Heuristic Planning with Large Language Models Using Learnable Domain Knowledge | VIDEO

In Time Series Classification (TSC), temporal pooling methods that consider sequential information have been proposed. However, we found that each temporal pooling has a distinct mechanism, and then can perform better or worse depending on time series data. We term this fixed pooling mechanism a single \textit{perspective} of temporal poolings. In this paper, we propose a novel temporal pooling method with diverse perspective learning: Selection over Multiple Temporal Poolings (SoM-TP). SoM-TP dynamically selects the optimal temporal pooling among multiple methods for each data by attention. The dynamic pooling selection is motivated by the ensemble concept of Multiple Choice Learning (MCL) which selects the best among multiple outputs. The pooling selection by SoM-TP's attention enables a non-iterative pooling ensemble within a single classifier. Additionally, we define a \textit{perspective loss} and Diverse Perspective Learning Network (DPLN). The loss works as a regularizer to reflect all the pooling perspectives from DPLN. Our perspective analysis using Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) reveals the limitation of a single perspective and ultimately demonstrates diverse perspective learning of SoM-TP. We also show that SoM-TP outperforms CNN models based on other temporal poolings and state-of-the-art models in TSC with extensive UCR/UEA repositories.

Building Higher-Order Abstractions from the Components of Recommender Systems | VIDEO

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High Significant Fault Detection in Azure Core Workload Insights | VIDEO

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