Search

In partially observable multi-agent systems, agents typically only have access to local observations. This severely hinders their ability to make precise decisions, particularly during decentralized execution. To alleviate this problem and inspired by image outpainting, we propose State Inference with Diffusion Models (SIDIFF), which uses diffusion models to reconstruct the original global state based solely on local observations. SIDIFF consists of a state generator and a state extractor, which allow agents to choose suitable actions by considering both the reconstructed global state and local observations. In addition, SIDIFF can be effortlessly incorporated into current multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms to improve their performance. Finally, we evaluated SIDIFF on different experimental platforms, including Multi-Agent Battle City (MABC), a novel and flexible multi-agent reinforcement learning environment we developed. SIDIFF achieved desirable results and outperformed other popular algorithms., Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures

In modern recommender systems, especially in e-commerce, predicting multiple targets such as click-through rate (CTR) and post-view conversion rate (CTCVR) is common. Multi-task recommender systems are increasingly popular in both research and practice, as they leverage shared knowledge across diverse business scenarios to enhance performance. However, emerging real-world scenarios and data privacy concerns complicate the development of a unified multi-task recommendation model. In this paper, we propose PF-MSMTrec, a novel framework for personalized federated multi-scenario multi-task recommendation. In this framework, each scenario is assigned to a dedicated client utilizing the Multi-gate Mixture-of-Experts (MMoE) structure. To address the unique challenges of multiple optimization conflicts, we introduce a bottom-up joint learning mechanism. First, we design a parameter template to decouple the expert network parameters, distinguishing scenario-specific parameters as shared knowledge for federated parameter aggregation. Second, we implement personalized federated learning for each expert network during a federated communication round, using three modules: federated batch normalization, conflict coordination, and personalized aggregation. Finally, we conduct an additional round of personalized federated parameter aggregation on the task tower network to obtain prediction results for multiple tasks. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. The source code and datasets will be released as open-source for public access.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) facilitates the fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) under limited resources. However, the fine-tuning performance with PEFT on complex, knowledge-intensive tasks is limited due to the constrained model capacity, which originates from the limited number of additional trainable parameters. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel mechanism that fine-tunes LLMs with adapters of larger size yet memory-efficient. This is achieved by leveraging the inherent activation sparsity in the Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) of LLMs and utilizing the larger capacity of Central Processing Unit (CPU) memory compared to Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). We store and update the parameters of larger adapters on the CPU. Moreover, we employ a Mixture of Experts (MoE)-like architecture to mitigate unnecessary CPU computations and reduce the communication volume between the GPU and CPU. This is particularly beneficial over the limited bandwidth of PCI Express (PCIe). Our method can achieve fine-tuning results comparable to those obtained with larger memory capacities, even when operating under more limited resources such as a 24GB memory single GPU setup, with acceptable loss in training efficiency. Our codes are available at https://github.com/CURRENTF/MEFT., Comment: ACL 24

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies from static datasets of previously collected trajectories. Existing methods for offline RL either constrain the learned policy to the support of offline data or utilize model-based virtual environments to generate simulated rollouts. However, these methods suffer from (i) poor generalization to unseen states; and (ii) trivial improvement from low-qualified rollout simulation. In this paper, we propose offline trajectory generalization through world transformers for offline reinforcement learning (OTTO). Specifically, we use casual Transformers, a.k.a. World Transformers, to predict state dynamics and the immediate reward. Then we propose four strategies to use World Transformers to generate high-rewarded trajectory simulation by perturbing the offline data. Finally, we jointly use offline data with simulated data to train an offline RL algorithm. OTTO serves as a plug-in module and can be integrated with existing offline RL methods to enhance them with better generalization capability of transformers and high-rewarded data augmentation. Conducting extensive experiments on D4RL benchmark datasets, we verify that OTTO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art offline RL methods.

Multimodal foundation models are transformative in sequential recommender systems, leveraging powerful representation learning capabilities. While Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) is commonly used to adapt foundation models for recommendation tasks, most research prioritizes parameter efficiency, often overlooking critical factors like GPU memory efficiency and training speed. Addressing this gap, our paper introduces IISAN (Intra- and Inter-modal Side Adapted Network for Multimodal Representation), a simple plug-and-play architecture using a Decoupled PEFT structure and exploiting both intra- and inter-modal adaptation. IISAN matches the performance of full fine-tuning (FFT) and state-of-the-art PEFT. More importantly, it significantly reduces GPU memory usage - from 47GB to just 3GB for multimodal sequential recommendation tasks. Additionally, it accelerates training time per epoch from 443s to 22s compared to FFT. This is also a notable improvement over the Adapter and LoRA, which require 37-39 GB GPU memory and 350-380 seconds per epoch for training. Furthermore, we propose a new composite efficiency metric, TPME (Training-time, Parameter, and GPU Memory Efficiency) to alleviate the prevalent misconception that "parameter efficiency represents overall efficiency". TPME provides more comprehensive insights into practical efficiency comparisons between different methods. Besides, we give an accessible efficiency analysis of all PEFT and FFT approaches, which demonstrate the superiority of IISAN. We release our codes and other materials at https://github.com/GAIR-Lab/IISAN., Comment: Accepted by SIGIR2024

Generative recommendation has emerged as a promising paradigm aimed at augmenting recommender systems with recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence. This task has been formulated as a sequence-to-sequence generation process, wherein the input sequence encompasses data pertaining to the user's previously interacted items, and the output sequence denotes the generative identifier for the suggested item. However, existing generative recommendation approaches still encounter challenges in (i) effectively integrating user-item collaborative signals and item content information within a unified generative framework, and (ii) executing an efficient alignment between content information and collaborative signals. In this paper, we introduce content-based collaborative generation for recommender systems, denoted as ColaRec. To capture collaborative signals, the generative item identifiers are derived from a pretrained collaborative filtering model, while the user is represented through the aggregation of interacted items' content. Subsequently, the aggregated textual description of items is fed into a language model to encapsulate content information. This integration enables ColaRec to amalgamate collaborative signals and content information within an end-to-end framework. Regarding the alignment, we propose an item indexing task to facilitate the mapping between the content-based semantic space and the interaction-based collaborative space. Additionally, a contrastive loss is introduced to ensure that items with similar collaborative GIDs possess comparable content representations, thereby enhancing alignment. To validate the efficacy of ColaRec, we conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets. Empirical results substantiate the superior performance of ColaRec.

Sequential Recommenders have been widely applied in various online services, aiming to model users' dynamic interests from their sequential interactions. With users increasingly engaging with online platforms, vast amounts of lifelong user behavioral sequences have been generated. However, existing sequential recommender models often struggle to handle such lifelong sequences. The primary challenges stem from computational complexity and the ability to capture long-range dependencies within the sequence. Recently, a state space model featuring a selective mechanism (i.e., Mamba) has emerged. In this work, we investigate the performance of Mamba for lifelong sequential recommendation (i.e., length>=2k). More specifically, we leverage the Mamba block to model lifelong user sequences selectively. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of representative sequential recommendation models in the setting of lifelong sequences. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of Mamba. We found that RecMamba achieves performance comparable to the representative model while significantly reducing training duration by approximately 70% and memory costs by 80%. Codes and data are available at \url{https://github.com/nancheng58/RecMamba}.

The existence and dynamics of stable quantized vortices is an important subject of quantum many-body physics. Spin-orbital-angular-momentum coupling (SOAMC), a special type of spin-orbit coupling, has been experimentally achieved to create vortices in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC). Here, we generalize the concept of SOAMC to a two-component polariton BEC and analyze the emergence and configuration of vortices under a finite-size circular pumping beam. We find that the regular configuration of vortex lattices induced by a finite-size circular pump is significantly distorted by the spatially dependent Raman coupling of SOAMC, even in the presence of a repulsive polariton interaction which can assist the forming of stable vortex configuration. Meanwhile, a pair of vortices induced by SOAMC located at the center of polariton cloud remains stable. When the Raman coupling is sufficiently strong and interaction is weak, the vortices spiraling in from the edge of polariton cloud will disrupt the polariton BEC.

Session-based recommendation predicts users' future interests from previous interactions in a session. Despite the memorizing of historical samples, the request of unlearning, i.e., to remove the effect of certain training samples, also occurs for reasons such as user privacy or model fidelity. However, existing studies on unlearning are not tailored for the session-based recommendation. On the one hand, these approaches cannot achieve satisfying unlearning effects due to the collaborative correlations and sequential connections between the unlearning item and the remaining items in the session. On the other hand, seldom work has conducted the research to verify the unlearning effectiveness in the session-based recommendation scenario. In this paper, we propose SRU, a session-based recommendation unlearning framework, which enables high unlearning efficiency, accurate recommendation performance, and improved unlearning effectiveness in session-based recommendation. Specifically, we first partition the training sessions into separate sub-models according to the similarity across the sessions, then we utilize an attention-based aggregation layer to fuse the hidden states according to the correlations between the session and the centroid of the data in the sub-model. To improve the unlearning effectiveness, we further propose three extra data deletion strategies, including collaborative extra deletion (CED), neighbor extra deletion (NED), and random extra deletion (RED). Besides, we propose an evaluation metric that measures whether the unlearning sample can be inferred after the data deletion to verify the unlearning effectiveness. We implement SRU with three representative session-based recommendation models and conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures

Sequential recommendation (SR) models are typically trained on user-item interactions which are affected by the system exposure bias, leading to the user preference learned from the biased SR model not being fully consistent with the true user preference. Exposure bias refers to the fact that user interactions are dependent upon the partial items exposed to the user. Existing debiasing methods do not make full use of the system exposure data and suffer from sub-optimal recommendation performance and high variance. In this paper, we propose to debias sequential recommenders through Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) over system exposure data. The key idea is to utilize DRO to optimize the worst-case error over an uncertainty set to safeguard the model against distributional discrepancy caused by the exposure bias. The main challenge to apply DRO for exposure debiasing in SR lies in how to construct the uncertainty set and avoid the overestimation of user preference on biased samples. Moreover, how to evaluate the debiasing effect on biased test set is also an open question. To this end, we first introduce an exposure simulator trained upon the system exposure data to calculate the exposure distribution, which is then regarded as the nominal distribution to construct the uncertainty set of DRO. Then, we introduce a penalty to items with high exposure probability to avoid the overestimation of user preference for biased samples. Finally, we design a debiased self-normalized inverse propensity score (SNIPS) evaluator for evaluating the debiasing effect on the biased offline test set. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Experimental results demonstrate the superior exposure debiasing performance of proposed methods. Codes and data are available at \url{https://github.com/nancheng58/DebiasedSR_DRO}., Comment: Accept by WSDM 2024

Sequential recommenders that are trained on implicit feedback are usually learned as a multi-class classification task through softmax-based loss functions on one-hot class labels. However, one-hot training labels are sparse and may lead to biased training and sub-optimal performance. Dense, soft labels have been shown to help improve recommendation performance. But how to generate high-quality and confident soft labels from noisy sequential interactions between users and items is still an open question. We propose a new learning framework for sequential recommenders, CSRec, which introduces confident soft labels to provide robust guidance when learning from user-item interactions. CSRec contains a teacher module that generates high-quality and confident soft labels and a student module that acts as the target recommender and is trained on the combination of dense, soft labels and sparse, one-hot labels. We propose and compare three approaches to constructing the teacher module: (i) model-level, (ii) data-level, and (iii) training-level. To evaluate the effectiveness and generalization ability of CSRec, we conduct experiments using various state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models as the target student module on four benchmark datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that CSRec is effective in training better performing sequential recommenders.

Satellite-based greenhouse gases (GHG) sensing technologies play a critical role in the study of global carbon emissions and climate change. However, none of the existing satellite-based GHG sensing technologies can achieve the measurement of broad bandwidth, high temporal-spatial resolution, and high sensitivity at the same time. Recently, dual-comb spectroscopy (DCS) has been proposed as a superior candidate technology for GHG sensing because it can measure broadband spectra with high temporal-spatial resolution and high sensitivity. The main barrier to DCS's display on satellites is its short measurement distance in open air achieved thus far. Prior research has not been able to implement DCS over 20 km of open-air path. Here, by developing a bistatic setup using time-frequency dissemination and high-power optical frequency combs, we have implemented DCS over a 113 km turbulent horizontal open-air path. Our experiment successfully measured GHG with 7 nm spectral bandwidth and a 10 kHz frequency and achieved a CO2 sensing precision of <2 ppm in 5 minutes and <0.6 ppm in 36 minutes. Our results represent a significant step towards advancing the implementation of DCS as a satellite-based technology and improving technologies for GHG monitoring, Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures

The presence of faulty or underactuated manipulators can disrupt the end-effector formation keeping of a team of manipulators. Based on two-link planar manipulators, we investigate this end-effector formation keeping problem for mixed fully- and under-actuated manipulators with flexible joints. In this case, the underactuated manipulators can comprise of active-passive (AP) manipulators, passive-active (PA) manipulators, or a combination thereof. We propose distributed control laws for the different types of manipulators to achieve and maintain the desired formation shape of the end-effectors. It is achieved by assigning virtual springs to the end-effectors for the fully-actuated ones and to the virtual end-effectors for the under-actuated ones. We study further the set of all desired and reachable shapes for the networked manipulators' end-effectors. Finally, we validate our analysis via numerical simulations., Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures

This paper addresses the problem of end-effector formation control for a mixed group of two-link manipulators moving in a horizontal plane that comprises of fully-actuated manipulators and underactuated manipulators with only the second joint being actuated (referred to as the passive-active (PA) manipulators). The problem is solved by extending the distributed end-effector formation controller for the fully-actuated manipulator to the PA manipulator moving in a horizontal plane by using its integrability. This paper presents stability analysis of the closed-loop systems under a given necessary condition, and we prove that the manipulators' end-effector converge to the desired formation shape. The proposed method is validated by simulations.

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external tools has emerged as a promising approach to extending the capability of LLMs. Although some works employ open-source LLMs for the tool learning task, most of them are trained in a controlled environment in which LLMs only learn to execute the human-provided tools. However, selecting proper tools from the large toolset is also a crucial ability for the tool learning model to be applied in real-world applications. Existing methods usually directly employ self-instruction methods to train the model, which ignores differences in tool complexity. In this paper, we propose the Confucius, a novel tool learning framework to train LLM to use complicated tools in real-world scenarios, which contains two main phases: (1) We first propose a multi-stage learning method to teach the LLM to use various tools from an easy-to-difficult curriculum; (2) thenceforth, we propose the Iterative Self-instruct from Introspective Feedback (ISIF) to dynamically construct the dataset to improve the ability to use the complicated tool. Extensive experiments conducted on both controlled and real-world settings demonstrate the superiority of our tool learning framework in the real-world application scenarios compared to both tuning-free (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude) and tuning-based baselines (e.g. GPT4Tools)., Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2024

Learning from corrupted labels is very common in real-world machine-learning applications. Memorizing such noisy labels could affect the learning of the model, leading to sub-optimal performances. In this work, we propose a novel framework to learn robust machine-learning models from noisy labels. Through an empirical study, we find that different models make relatively similar predictions on clean examples, while the predictions on noisy examples vary much more across different models. Motivated by this observation, we propose \em denoising with cross-model agreement \em (DeCA) which aims to minimize the KL-divergence between the true label distributions parameterized by two machine learning models while maximizing the likelihood of data observation. We employ the proposed DeCA on both the binary label scenario and the multiple label scenario. For the binary label scenario, we select implicit feedback recommendation as the downstream task and conduct experiments with four state-of-the-art recommendation models on four datasets. For the multiple-label scenario, the downstream application is image classification on two benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly improve the model performance compared with normal training and other denoising methods on both binary and multiple-label scenarios., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2105.09605

Recently, the steady state superradiance in degenerate Fermi gases has been realized in a cavity, following the previous discovery of the Dicke transition in Bose gases. The most prominent signature of fermionic Dicke transition is its density dependence, which is manifested as the Fermi surface nesting effect and the Pauli blocking effect. We study the superradiant transition in one-dimensional Fermi gases in a cavity with the presence of an incommensurate dipolar lattice. We find a first-order Dicke transition induced by indirect resonance effect, which is a resonance between two atomic levels by the level repulsion from a third level, and causes extra gap opening. By formulating a phenomenological theory, we find that the critical pumping strength for this first-order Dicke transition shows a linear V-shape kink near a particular indirect resonance modified filling $\nu_{\rm IRM}$. The presence and the unique density dependence of this transition manifest the fermionic nature and verify the mechanism of the quasicrystal superradiant transition., Comment: 5+8 pages, 3+6 figures

The research field of Information Retrieval (IR) has evolved significantly, expanding beyond traditional search to meet diverse user information needs. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in text understanding, generation, and knowledge inference, opening up exciting avenues for IR research. LLMs not only facilitate generative retrieval but also offer improved solutions for user understanding, model evaluation, and user-system interactions. More importantly, the synergistic relationship among IR models, LLMs, and humans forms a new technical paradigm that is more powerful for information seeking. IR models provide real-time and relevant information, LLMs contribute internal knowledge, and humans play a central role of demanders and evaluators to the reliability of information services. Nevertheless, significant challenges exist, including computational costs, credibility concerns, domain-specific limitations, and ethical considerations. To thoroughly discuss the transformative impact of LLMs on IR research, the Chinese IR community conducted a strategic workshop in April 2023, yielding valuable insights. This paper provides a summary of the workshop's outcomes, including the rethinking of IR's core values, the mutual enhancement of LLMs and IR, the proposal of a novel IR technical paradigm, and open challenges., Comment: 17 pages

$R_{D^{(*)}}$ is the ratio of branching ratio $\overline{B} \rightarrow D^{(*)}\tau\overline{\nu}_{\tau}$ to $\overline{B} \rightarrow D^{(*)}l\overline{\nu}_{l}~(l=e,~\mu)$. There is a gap of 2$\sigma_{exp}$ or more between its experimental value and the prediction under the standard model(SM). People extend the MSSM with the local gauge group $U(1)_X$ to obtain the $U(1)_X$SSM. Compared with MSSM, $U(1)_X$SSM has more superfields and effects. In $U(1)_X$SSM, we research the semileptonic decays $\overline{B} \rightarrow D^{(*)}l\overline{\nu}_{l}$ and calculate $R_{D^{(*)}}$. The numerical results of $R_{D^{(*)}}$ are further corrected under $U(1)_X$SSM, which are much better than the SM predictions. After correction, the theoretical value of $R_{D^{(*)}}$ can reach one $\sigma_{exp}$ range of the averaged experiment central value., Comment: 25 pages, 16 figures