Recommender systems play a crucial role in our daily lives. Feed streaming mechanism has been widely used in the recommender system, especially on the mobile Apps. The feed streaming setting provides users the interactive manner of recommendation in never-ending feeds. In such a manner, a good recommender system should pay more attention to user stickiness, which is far beyond classical instant metrics and typically measured by long-term user engagement. Directly optimizing long-term user engagement is a non-trivial problem, as the learning target is usually not available for conventional supervised learning methods. Though reinforcement learning (RL) naturally fits the problem of maximizing the long term rewards, applying RL to optimize long-term user engagement is still facing challenges: user behaviors are versatile to model, which typically consists of both instant feedback (e.g., clicks) and delayed feedback (e.g., dwell time, revisit); in addition, performing effective off-policy learning is still immature, especially when combining bootstrapping and function approximation.To address these issues, in this work, we introduce a RL framework -FeedRec to optimize the long-term user engagement. Fee-dRec includes two components: 1) a Q-Network which designed in hierarchical LSTM takes charge of modeling complex user behaviors, and 2) a S-Network, which simulates the environment, assists the Q-Network and voids the instability of convergence in policy learning. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and a real-world large scale data show that FeedRec effectively optimizes the longterm user engagement and outperforms state-of-the-arts. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Recommender systems; Personalization; • Theory of computation → Sequential decision making. * Work performed during an internship at JD.com.

Post-click conversion, as a strong signal indicating the user preference, is salutary for building recommender systems. However, accurately estimating the post-click conversion rate (CVR) is challenging due to the selection bias, i.e., the observed clicked events usually happen on users' preferred items. Currently, most existing methods utilize counterfactual learning to debias recommender systems. Among them, the doubly robust (DR) estimator has achieved competitive performance by combining the error imputation based (EIB) estimator and the inverse propensity score (IPS) estimator in a doubly robust way. However, inaccurate error imputation may result in its higher variance than the IPS estimator. Worse still, existing methods typically use simple model-agnostic methods to estimate the imputation error, which are not sufficient to approximate the dynamically changing model-correlated target (i.e., the gradient direction of the prediction model). To solve these problems, we first derive the bias and variance of the DR estimator. Based on it, a more robust doubly robust (MRDR) estimator has been proposed to further reduce its variance while retaining its double robustness. Moreover, we propose a novel double learning approach for the MRDR estimator, which can convert the error imputation into the general CVR estimation. Besides, we empirically verify that the proposed learning scheme can further eliminate the high variance problem of the imputation learning. To evaluate its effectiveness, extensive experiments are conducted on a semi-synthetic dataset and two real-world datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/guosyjlu/MRDR-DL. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Recommender systems.

In this paper, we study collaborative filtering in an interactive setting, in which the recommender agents iterate between making recommendations and updating the user profile based on the interactive feedback. The most challenging problem in this scenario is how to suggest items when the user profile has not been well established, i.e., recommend for cold-start users or warm-start users with taste drifting. Existing approaches either rely on overly pessimistic linear exploration strategy or adopt meta-learning based algorithms in a full exploitation way. In this work, to quickly catch up with the user's interests, we propose to represent the exploration policy with a neural network and directly learn it from the feedback data. Specifically, the exploration policy is encoded in the weights of multi-channel stacked self-attention neural networks and trained with efficient Q-learning by maximizing users' overall satisfaction in the recommender systems. The key insight is that the satisfied recommendations triggered by the exploration recommendation can be viewed as the exploration bonus (delayed reward) for its contribution on improving the quality of the user profile. Therefore, the proposed exploration policy, to balance between learning the user profile and making accurate recommendations, can be directly optimized by maximizing users' long-term satisfaction with reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments and analysis conducted on three benchmark collaborative filtering datasets have demonstrated the advantage of our method over state-of-the-art methods.

Recommender Systems have been playing essential roles in ecommerce portals. Existing recommendation algorithms usually learn the ranking scores of items by optimizing a single task (e.g., Click-through rate prediction) based on users' historical click sequences, but they generally pay few attention to simultaneously modeling users' multiple types of behaviors or jointly optimize multiple objectives (e.g., both Click-through rate and Conversion rate), which are both vital for e-commerce sites. In this paper, we argue that it is crucial to formulate users' different interests based on multiple types of behaviors and perform multi-task learning for significant improvement in multiple objectives simultaneously. We propose Deep Multifaceted Transformers (DMT), a novel framework that can model users' multiple types of behavior sequences simultaneously with multiple Transformers. It utilizes Multi-gate Mixture-of-Experts to optimize multiple objectives. Besides, it exploits unbiased learning to reduce the selection bias in the training data. Experiments on JD real production dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of DMT, which significantly outperforms state-ofart methods. DMT has been successfully deployed to serve the main traffic in the commercial Recommender System in JD.com. To facilitate future research, we release the codes and datasets at https://github.com/guyulongcs/CIKM2020_DMT.

Spatio-temporal relations among facial action units (AUs) convey significant information for AU detection yet have not been thoroughly exploited. The main reasons are the limited capability of current AU detection works in simultaneously learning spatial and temporal relations, and the lack of precise localization information for AU feature learning. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel spatio-temporal relation and attention learning framework for AU detection. Specifically, we introduce a spatiotemporal graph convolutional network to capture both spatial and temporal relations from dynamic AUs, in which the AU relations are formulated as a spatio-temporal graph with adaptively learned instead of predefined edge weights. Moreover, the learning of spatio-temporal relations among AUs requires individual AU features. Considering the dynamism and shape irregularity of AUs, we propose an attention regularization method to adaptively learn regional attentions that capture highly relevant regions and suppress irrelevant regions so as to extract a complete feature for each AU. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves substantial improvements over the stateof-the-art AU detection methods on BP4D and especially DISFA benchmarks.

As the heart of a search engine, the ranking system plays a crucial role in satisfying users' information demands. More recently, neural rankers fine-tuned from pre-trained language models (PLMs) establish state-of-the-art ranking effectiveness. However, it is nontrivial to directly apply these PLM-based rankers to the large-scale web search system due to the following challenging issues: (1) the prohibitively expensive computations of massive neural PLMs, especially for long texts in the web-document, prohibit their deployments in an online ranking system that demands extremely low latency; (2) the discrepancy between existing ranking-agnostic pre-training objectives and the ad-hoc retrieval scenarios that demand comprehensive relevance modeling is another main barrier for improving the online ranking system; (3) a real-world search engine typically involves a committee of ranking components, and thus the compatibility of the individually fine-tuned ranking model is critical for a cooperative ranking system.In this work, we contribute a series of successfully applied techniques in tackling these exposed issues when deploying the stateof-the-art Chinese pre-trained language model, i.e., ERNIE, in the online search engine system. We first articulate a novel practice to cost-efficiently summarize the web document and contextualize the resultant summary content with the query using a cheap yet powerful Pyramid-ERNIE architecture. Then we endow an innovative paradigm to finely exploit the large-scale noisy and biased post-click behavioral data for relevance-oriented pre-training. We also propose a human-anchored fine-tuning strategy tailored for the online ranking system, aiming to stabilize the ranking signals across various online components. Extensive offline and online experimental results show that the proposed techniques significantly boost the search engine's performance.

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Recently, the monkeypox virus has begun to spread in many countries worldwide [1]. The genome sequence of the monkeypox virus variant responsible for the current outbreak has been reported, thus providing an important resource for better understanding the new variant and accelerating vaccine and drug development. Here, we report structure predictions of the whole proteomes of three monkeypox variants, with annotation of potential small-molecule-binding regions of the proteins. Experimentally determined structures with high similarity to monkeypox proteins were vetted through a structure-alignment algorithm. Our work should help accelerate the development of vaccines and drugs.