推荐系统通常会从各种用户行为中学习用户兴趣，包括点击和点击后行为（例如，喜欢和喜欢）。但是，这些行为不可避免地表现出受欢迎程度的偏见，从而导致一些不公平的问题：1）对于具有相似质量，更受欢迎的物品的物品会获得更多的曝光； 2）更糟糕的是，受欢迎程度较低的流行物品可能会获得更多的曝光率。现有关于缓解流行偏见的工作会盲目消除偏见，通常忽略项目质量的影响。我们认为，不同用户行为（例如，转换率）之间的关系实际上反映了项目质量。因此，为了处理不公平的问题，我们建议通过考虑多种用户行为来减轻流行性偏见。在这项工作中，我们研究了多行为推荐中相互作用生成过程背后的因果关系。具体来说，我们发现：1）项目受欢迎程度是暴露的项目和用户的点击交互之间的混杂因素，导致第一个不公平； 2）一些隐藏的混杂因素（例如，项目生产者的声誉）影响了项目的流行和质量，导致第二次不公平。为了减轻这些混杂问题，我们提出了一个因果框架来估计因果效应，该因果效应利用后门调整以阻止混杂因素引起的后门路径。在推论阶段，我们消除了受欢迎程度的负面影响，并利用质量的良好效果进行推荐。在两个现实世界数据集上的实验验证了我们提出的框架的有效性，这在不牺牲建议准确性的情况下增强了公平性。

了解用户的意图并从句子中识别出语义实体，即自然语言理解（NLU），是许多自然语言处理任务的上游任务。主要挑战之一是收集足够数量的注释数据来培训模型。现有有关文本增强的研究并没有充分考虑实体，因此对于NLU任务的表现不佳。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种新型的NLP数据增强技术，实体意识数据增强（EADA），该技术应用了树结构，实体意识到语法树（EAST），以表示句子与对实体的注意相结合。我们的EADA技术会自动从少量注释的数据中构造东方，然后生成大量的培训实例，以进行意图检测和插槽填充。四个数据集的实验结果表明，该技术在准确性和泛化能力方面显着优于现有数据增强方法。

在基于检索的聊天机器人中，对候选人检索的语义搜索是一个重要但被忽视的问题，该聊天机器人的目的是从大型池中有效地选择一堆候选反应。现有的瓶颈是确保模型体系结构具有两个点：1）查询和响应之间的丰富交互作用，以产生与查询相关的响应； 2）将查询和响应分别投影到潜在空间中的能力，可以在线推断期间有效地应用语义搜索。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种新颖的方法，称为候选检索，称为基于多任务的语义搜索神经网络（MSSNN），该方法通过多任务完成了查询 - 响应相互作用。该方法采用SEQ2SEQ建模任务来学习一个良好的查询编码器，然后执行单词预测任务以构建响应嵌入，最后执行一个简单的匹配模型来形成点产品得分手。实验研究表明了所提出的方法的潜力。

Late-life depression (LLD) is a highly prevalent mood disorder occurring in older adults and is frequently accompanied by cognitive impairment (CI). Studies have shown that LLD may increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, the heterogeneity of presentation of geriatric depression suggests that multiple biological mechanisms may underlie it. Current biological research on LLD progression incorporates machine learning that combines neuroimaging data with clinical observations. There are few studies on incident cognitive diagnostic outcomes in LLD based on structural MRI (sMRI). In this paper, we describe the development of a hybrid representation learning (HRL) framework for predicting cognitive diagnosis over 5 years based on T1-weighted sMRI data. Specifically, we first extract prediction-oriented MRI features via a deep neural network, and then integrate them with handcrafted MRI features via a Transformer encoder for cognitive diagnosis prediction. Two tasks are investigated in this work, including (1) identifying cognitively normal subjects with LLD and never-depressed older healthy subjects, and (2) identifying LLD subjects who developed CI (or even AD) and those who stayed cognitively normal over five years. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first attempts to study the complex heterogeneous progression of LLD based on task-oriented and handcrafted MRI features. We validate the proposed HRL on 294 subjects with T1-weighted MRIs from two clinically harmonized studies. Experimental results suggest that the HRL outperforms several classical machine learning and state-of-the-art deep learning methods in LLD identification and prediction tasks.

Autonomous robotic surgery has advanced significantly based on analysis of visual and temporal cues in surgical workflow, but relational cues from domain knowledge remain under investigation. Complex relations in surgical annotations can be divided into intra- and inter-relations, both valuable to autonomous systems to comprehend surgical workflows. Intra- and inter-relations describe the relevance of various categories within a particular annotation type and the relevance of different annotation types, respectively. This paper aims to systematically investigate the importance of relational cues in surgery. First, we contribute the RLLS12M dataset, a large-scale collection of robotic left lateral sectionectomy (RLLS), by curating 50 videos of 50 patients operated by 5 surgeons and annotating a hierarchical workflow, which consists of 3 inter- and 6 intra-relations, 6 steps, 15 tasks, and 38 activities represented as the triplet of 11 instruments, 8 actions, and 16 objects, totaling 2,113,510 video frames and 12,681,060 annotation entities. Correspondingly, we propose a multi-relation purification hybrid network (MURPHY), which aptly incorporates novel relation modules to augment the feature representation by purifying relational features using the intra- and inter-relations embodied in annotations. The intra-relation module leverages a R-GCN to implant visual features in different graph relations, which are aggregated using a targeted relation purification with affinity information measuring label consistency and feature similarity. The inter-relation module is motivated by attention mechanisms to regularize the influence of relational features based on the hierarchy of annotation types from the domain knowledge. Extensive experimental results on the curated RLLS dataset confirm the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating that relations matter in surgical workflow analysis.

Many real-world applications of language models (LMs), such as code autocomplete and writing assistance, involve human-LM interaction, but the main LM benchmarks are non-interactive, where a system produces output without human intervention. To evaluate human-LM interaction, we develop a framework, Human-AI Language-based Interaction Evaluation (H-LINE), that expands non-interactive evaluation along three dimensions, capturing (i) the interactive process, not only the final output; (ii) the first-person subjective experience, not just a third-party assessment; and (iii) notions of preference beyond quality. We then design five tasks ranging from goal-oriented to open-ended to capture different forms of interaction. On four state-of-the-art LMs (three variants of OpenAI's GPT-3 and AI21's J1-Jumbo), we find that non-interactive performance does not always result in better human-LM interaction and that first-person and third-party metrics can diverge, suggesting the importance of examining the nuances of human-LM interaction.

End-to-end Speech Translation (E2E ST) aims to translate source speech into target translation without generating the intermediate transcript. However, existing approaches for E2E ST degrade considerably when only limited ST data are available. We observe that an ST model's performance strongly correlates with its embedding similarity from speech and transcript. In this paper, we propose Word-Aligned COntrastive learning (WACO), a novel method for few-shot speech-to-text translation. Our key idea is bridging word-level representations for both modalities via contrastive learning. We evaluate WACO and other methods on the MuST-C dataset, a widely used ST benchmark. Our experiments demonstrate that WACO outperforms the best baseline methods by 0.7-8.5 BLEU points with only 1-hour parallel data. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/WACO .

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Recently, the success of pre-training in text domain has been fully extended to vision, audio, and cross-modal scenarios. The proposed pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures, which brings the opportunity to implement different pre-training models within a uniform framework. In this paper, we present TencentPretrain, a toolkit supporting pre-training models of different modalities. The core feature of TencentPretrain is the modular design. The toolkit uniformly divides pre-training models into 5 components: embedding, encoder, target embedding, decoder, and target. As almost all of common modules are provided in each component, users can choose the desired modules from different components to build a complete pre-training model. The modular design enables users to efficiently reproduce existing pre-training models or build brand-new one. We test the toolkit on text, vision, and audio benchmarks and show that it can match the performance of the original implementations.

Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs), such as social gathering restrictions, have shown effectiveness to slow the transmission of COVID-19 by reducing the contact of people. To support policy-makers, multiple studies have first modeled human mobility via macro indicators (e.g., average daily travel distance) and then studied the effectiveness of NPIs. In this work, we focus on mobility modeling and, from a micro perspective, aim to predict locations that will be visited by COVID-19 cases. Since NPIs generally cause economic and societal loss, such a micro perspective prediction benefits governments when they design and evaluate them. However, in real-world situations, strict privacy data protection regulations result in severe data sparsity problems (i.e., limited case and location information). To address these challenges, we formulate the micro perspective mobility modeling into computing the relevance score between a diffusion and a location, conditional on a geometric graph. we propose a model named Deep Graph Diffusion Infomax (DGDI), which jointly models variables including a geometric graph, a set of diffusions and a set of locations.To facilitate the research of COVID-19 prediction, we present two benchmarks that contain geometric graphs and location histories of COVID-19 cases. Extensive experiments on the two benchmarks show that DGDI significantly outperforms other competing methods.