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Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is one of the fundamental tasks in online advertising and recommendation. Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) serves as a core component in many deep CTR prediction models, but it has been widely shown that applying a vanilla MLP network alone is ineffective in learning complex feature interactions. As such, many two-stream models (e.g., Wide&amp;Deep, DeepFM, and DCN) have recently been proposed, aiming to integrate two parallel sub-networks to learn feature interactions from two different views for enhanced CTR prediction. In addition to one MLP stream that learns feature interactions implicitly, most of the existing research focuses on designing another stream to complement the MLP stream with explicitly enhanced feature interactions. 
Instead, this paper presents a simple two-stream feature interaction model, namely FinalMLP, which employs only MLPs in both streams yet achieves surprisingly strong performance. In contrast to sophisticated network design in each stream, our work enhances CTR modeling through a feature selection module, which produces differentiated feature inputs to two streams, and a group-wise bilinear fusion module, which effectively captures stream-level interactions across two streams. We show that FinalMLP achieves competitive or even better performance against many existing two-stream CTR models on four open benchmark datasets and also brings significant CTR improvements during an online A/B test in our industrial news recommender system. We envision that the simple yet effective FinalMLP model could serve as a new strong baseline for future development of two-stream CTR models. Our source code will be available at MindSpore/models and FuxiCTR/model_zoo.

AAAI 2023

FinalMLP: An Enhanced Two-Stream MLP Model for CTR Prediction

ctr prediction

two-stream

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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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.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is one of the fundamental tasks in online advertising and recommendation. Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) serves as a core component in many deep CTR prediction models, but it has been widely shown that applying a vanilla MLP network alone is ineffective in learning complex feature interactions. As such, many two-stream models (e.g., Wide&Deep, DeepFM, and DCN) have recently been proposed, aiming to integrate two parallel sub-networks to learn feature interactions from two different views for enhanced CTR prediction. In addition to one MLP stream that learns feature interactions implicitly, most of the existing research focuses on designing another stream to complement the MLP stream with explicitly enhanced feature interactions. 
Instead, this paper presents a simple two-stream feature interaction model, namely FinalMLP, which employs only MLPs in both streams yet achieves surprisingly strong performance. In contrast to sophisticated network design in each stream, our work enhances CTR modeling through a feature selection module, which produces differentiated feature inputs to two streams, and a group-wise bilinear fusion module, which effectively captures stream-level interactions across two streams. We show that FinalMLP achieves competitive or even better performance against many existing two-stream CTR models on four open benchmark datasets and also brings significant CTR improvements during an online A/B test in our industrial news recommender system. We envision that the simple yet effective FinalMLP model could serve as a new strong baseline for future development of two-stream CTR models. Our source code will be available at MindSpore/models and FuxiCTR/model_zoo.

poster

Wasserstein barycenter, built on the theory of Optimal {T}ransport ({OT}), provides a powerful framework to aggregate probability distributions, and it has increasingly attracted great attention within the machine learning community. However, it is often intractable to precisely compute, especially for high dimensional and continuous settings. To alleviate this problem, we develop a novel regularization by using the fact that c-cyclical monotonicity is often necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality in OT problems, and incorporate it into the dual formulation of Wasserstein barycenters. For efficient computations, we adopt a variational distribution as the approximation of the true continuous barycenter, so as to frame the Wasserstein barycenters problem as an optimization problem with respect to variational parameters. Upon those ideas, we propose a novel end-to-end continuous approximation method, namely Variational Wasserstein Barycenters with c-Cyclical Monotonicity Regularization (VWB-\textsc{cmr}\xspace), given sample access to the input distributions. We show theoretical convergence analysis and demonstrate the superior performance of VWB-\textsc{cmr}\xspace on synthetic data and real applications of subset posterior aggregation.

Variational Wasserstein Barycenters with c-Cyclical Monotonicity Regularization

Text recognition is a long-standing research problem for document digitalization. Existing approaches are usually built based on CNN for image understanding and RNN for char-level text generation. In addition, another language model is usually needed to improve the overall accuracy as a post-processing step. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end text recognition approach with pre-trained image Transformer and text Transformer models, namely TrOCR, which leverages the Transformer architecture for both image understanding and wordpiece-level text generation. The TrOCR model is simple but effective, and can be pre-trained with large-scale synthetic data and fine-tuned with human-labeled datasets. Experiments show that the TrOCR model outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on the printed, handwritten and scene text recognition tasks. The TrOCR models and code are publicly available at https://aka.ms/trocr.

TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models

Text-guided image editing models have shown remarkable results. However, there remain two problems. First, they employ fixed manipulation modules for various editing requirements (e.g., color changing, texture changing, content adding and removing), which results in over-editing or insufficient editing. Second, they do not clearly distinguish between text-required and text-irrelevant parts, which leads to inaccurate editing.
To solve these limitations, we propose:
(i) a Dynamic Editing Block (DEBlock) which composes different editing modules dynamically for various editing requirements.
(ii) a Composition Predictor (Comp-Pred) which predicts the composition weights for DEBlock according to the inference on target texts and source images.
(iii) a Dynamic text-adaptive Convolution Block (DCBlock) which queries source image features to distinguish text-required parts and text-irrelevant parts.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DE-Net achieves excellent performance and manipulates source images more correctly and accurately.

DE-Net: Dynamic Text-guided Image Editing Adversarial Networks

Reflectance layer estimation from a single image is a challenging task in computer vision. It is more challenging when the input image contains shadows or specular highlights, which often render an inaccurate estimate of the reflectance layer. To this end, we propose a two-stage learning method, including reflectance guidance and a shadow/specular-aware network to tackle the problem. In the first stage, an initial reflectance layer free from shadows and specularity is obtained with the constraint of novel losses that are guided by prior-based shadow-free and specular-free images. To further enforce the reflectance layer to be independent from shadows and specularity in the second-stage refinement, we introduce a shadow/specular-aware network that distinguishes the reflectance image from the input image. Our network employs a classifier to categorize shadow/shadow-free, specular/specular-free classes, enabling the activation features to work as attention maps that focus on shadow/specular regions. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the reflectance layer that is free from shadows and specularity.

Estimating Reflectance Layer from A Single Image: Integrating Reflectance Guidance and Shadow/Specular Aware Learning

Multi-action dialog policy (MADP), which generates multiple atomic dialog actions per turn, has been widely applied in task-oriented dialog systems to provide expressive and efficient system responses. Existing MADP models usually imitate action combinations from the labeled multi-action dialog samples. Due to data limitations, they generalize poorly toward unseen dialog flows. While reinforcement learning-based methods are proposed to incorporate the service ratings from real users and user simulators as external supervision signals, they suffer from sparse and less credible dialog-level rewards. To cope with this problem, we explore to improve MADPL with explicit and implicit turn-level user feedback received for historical predictions (i.e., logged user feedback) that are cost-efficient to collect and faithful to real-world scenarios. The task is challenging since the logged user feedback provides only partial label feedback limited to the particular historical dialog actions predicted by the agent. To fully exploit such feedback information, we propose BanditMatch, which addresses the task from a feedback-enhanced semi-supervised learning perspective with a hybrid learning objective of SSL and bandit learning. BanditMatch integrates pseudo-labeling methods to better explore the action space through constructing full label feedback. Extensive experiments show that our BanditMatch improves MADPL over the state-of-the-art methods by generating more concise and informative responses. 

Multi-Action Dialog Policy Learning from Logged User Feedback

Several techniques have recently aimed to improve the performance of deep learning models for Scene Graph Generation (SGG) by incorporating background knowledge. State-of-the-art techniques can be divided into two families: one where the background knowledge is incorporated into the model in a subsymbolic fashion, and another in which the background knowledge is maintained in symbolic form. Despite promising results, both families of techniques face several shortcomings: the first one requires ad-hoc, more complex neural architectures increasing the training or inference cost; the second one suffers from limited scalability w.r.t. the size of the background knowledge. Our work introduces a regularization technique for injecting symbolic background knowledge into neural SGG models that overcomes the limitations of prior art. Our technique is model-agnostic, does not incur any cost at inference time, and scales to previously unmanageable background knowledge sizes. We empirically demonstrate that our technique can much improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art SGG models, by up to 33%.

Scalable Theory-Driven Regularization of Scene Graph Generation Models

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) has become an emerging task in sentiment analysis research, aiming to extract triplets of the aspect term, its corresponding opinion term, and its associated sentiment polarity from a given sentence. Recently, many neural networks based models with different tagging schemes have been proposed, but almost all of them have their limitations: heavily relying on 1) prior assumption that each word is only associated with a single role (e.g., aspect term, or opinion term, etc. ) and 2) word-level interactions and treating each opinion/aspect as a set of independent words. Hence, they perform poorly on the complex ASTE task, such as a word associated with multiple roles or an aspect/opinion term with multiple words. Hence, we propose a novel approach, Span TAgging and Greedy infErence (STAGE), to extract sentiment triplets in span-level, where each span may consist of multiple words and play different roles simultaneously. To this end, this paper formulates the ASTE task as a multi-class span classification problem. Specifically, STAGE generates more accurate aspect sentiment triplet extractions via exploring span-level information and constraints, which consists of two components, namely, span tagging scheme and greedy inference strategy. The former tag all possible candidate spans based on a newly-defined tagging set. The latter retrieves the aspect/opinion term with the maximum length from the candidate sentiment snippet to output sentiment triplets. Furthermore, we propose a simple but effective model based on the STAGE, which outperforms the state-of-the-arts by a large margin on four widely-used datasets. Moreover, our STAGE can be easily generalized to other pair/triplet extraction tasks, which also demonstrates the superiority of the proposed scheme STAGE.

STAGE: Span Tagging and Greedy Inference Scheme for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Learning the underlying distribution of molecular graphs and generating high-fidelity samples is a fundamental research problem in drug discovery and material science. However, accurately modeling distribution and rapidly generating novel molecular graphs remain crucial and challenging goals. To accomplish these goals, we propose a novel Conditional Diffusion model based on discrete Graph Structures (CDGS) for molecular graph generation. Specifically, we construct a forward graph diffusion process on both graph structures and inherent features through stochastic differential equations (SDE) and derive discrete graph structures as the condition for reverse generative processes. We present a specialized hybrid graph noise prediction model that extracts the global context and the local node-edge dependency from intermediate graph states. We further utilize ordinary differential equation (ODE) solvers for efficient graph sampling, based on the semi-linear structure of the probability flow ODE. We also combine the solvers with gradient guidance from the molecule property predictor for similarity-constrained molecule optimization. Experiments on diverse datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework. Particularly, the proposed method still generates high-quality molecular graphs in a limited number of steps.

Conditional Diffusion Based on Discrete Graph Structures for Molecular Graph Generation

Hedonic games model cooperative games where agents desire to form coalitions, and only care about the composition of the coalitions of which they are members. Focusing on various classes of dichotomous hedonic games, where each agent either approves or disapproves a given coalition, we propose the random extension, where players have an independent participation probability. We initiate the research on the computational complexity of computing the probability that coalitions and partitions are optimal or stable. While some cases admit efficient algorithms (e.g., agents approve only few coalitions), they become computationally hard (#P-hard) in their complementary scenario. We then investigate the distribution of coalitions in perfect partitions and their performance in majority games, where an agent approves coalitions in which the agent is friends with the majority of its members. When friendships independently form with a constant probability, we prove that the number of coalitions of size 3 converges in distribution to a Poisson random variable.

Complexity of Probabilistic Inference in Random Dichotomous Hedonic Games

Analyzing the inner mechanisms of deep neural networks is a fundamental task in machine learning. Existing work provides limited analysis or it depends on local theories, such as fixed-point analysis. In contrast, we propose to analyze trained neural networks using an operator theoretic approach which is rooted in Koopman theory, the Koopman Analysis of Neural Networks (KANN). Key to our method is the Koopman operator, which is a linear object that globally represents the dominant behavior of the network dynamics. The linearity of the Koopman operator facilitates analysis via its eigenvectors and eigenvalues. Our method reveals that the latter eigendecomposition holds semantic information related to the neural network inner workings. For instance,  the eigenvectors highlight positive and negative n-grams in the sentiments analysis task; similarly, the eigenvectors capture the salient features of healthy heart beat signals in the ECG classification problem.

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FinalMLP: An Enhanced Two-Stream MLP Model for CTR Prediction

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