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Personalized conversation models (PCMs) generate responses according to speaker preferences. Existing personalized conversation tasks typically require models to extract speaker preferences from user descriptions or their conversation histories, which are scarce for newcomers and inactive users. In this paper, we propose a few-shot personalized conversation task with an auxiliary social network. The task requires models to generate personalized responses for a speaker given a few conversations from the speaker and a social network. Existing methods are mainly designed to incorporate descriptions or conversation histories. Those methods can hardly model speakers with so few conversations or connections between speakers. To better cater for newcomers with few resources, we propose a personalized conversation model (PCM) that learns to adapt to new speakers as well as enabling new speakers to learn from resource-rich speakers. Particularly, based on a meta-learning based PCM, we propose a task aggregator (TA) to collect other speakers&#39; information from the social network. The TA provides prior knowledge of the new speaker in its meta-learning. Experimental results show our methods outperform all baselines in appropriateness, diversity, and consistency with speakers.

AAAI 2021

Learning from My Friends: Few-Shot Personalized Conversation Systems via Social Networks

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

Personalized conversation models (PCMs) generate responses according to speaker preferences. Existing personalized conversation tasks typically require models to extract speaker preferences from user descriptions or their conversation histories, which are scarce for newcomers and inactive users. In this paper, we propose a few-shot personalized conversation task with an auxiliary social network. The task requires models to generate personalized responses for a speaker given a few conversations from the speaker and a social network. Existing methods are mainly designed to incorporate descriptions or conversation histories. Those methods can hardly model speakers with so few conversations or connections between speakers. To better cater for newcomers with few resources, we propose a personalized conversation model (PCM) that learns to adapt to new speakers as well as enabling new speakers to learn from resource-rich speakers. Particularly, based on a meta-learning based PCM, we propose a task aggregator (TA) to collect other speakers' information from the social network. The TA provides prior knowledge of the new speaker in its meta-learning. Experimental results show our methods outperform all baselines in appropriateness, diversity, and consistency with speakers.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Visual storytelling is a task of creating a short story based on photo streams. Different from visual captions, stories contain not only factual descriptions, but also imaginary concepts that do not appear in the images. In this paper, we propose a novel imagine-reason-write generation framework (IRW) for visual storytelling, inspired by the logic of humans when they write the story. First, an imagine module is leveraged to learn the imaginative storyline explicitly, improving the coherence and reasonability of the generated story. Second, we employ a reason module to fully exploit the external knowledge (commonsense knowledge base) and task-specific knowledge (scene graph and event graph) with relational reasoning method based on the storyline. In this way, we can effectively capture the most informative commonsense and visual relationships among objects in images, which enhances the diversity and informativeness of the generated story. Finally, we integrate the imaginary concepts and relational knowledge to generate human-like story based on the original semantics of images. Extensive experiments on a benchmark dataset (i.e., VIST) demonstrate that the proposed IRW framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics.

Imagine, Reason and Write: Visual Storytelling with Graph Knowledge and Relational Reasoning

Sequential recommender systems (SRS) have become a research hotspot in recent studies. Because of the requirement in capturing user's dynamic interests, sequential neural network based recommender models often need to be stacked with more hidden layers (e.g., up to 100 layers) compared with standard collaborative filtering methods. However, the high network latency has become the main obstacle when deploying very deep recommender models into a production environment. In this paper, we argue that the typical prediction framework that treats all users equally during the inference phase is inefficient in running time, as well as sub-optimal in accuracy. To resolve such an issue, we present SkipRec, an adaptive inference framework by learning to skip inactive hidden layers on a per-user basis. Specifically, we devise a policy network to automatically determine which layers should be retained and which layers are allowed to be skipped, so as to achieve user-specific decisions. To derive the optimal skipping policy, we propose using gumbel softmax and reinforcement learning to solve the non-differentiable problem during backpropagation. 
We perform extensive experiments on three real-world recommendation datasets, and demonstrate that SkipRec attains comparable or better accuracy with much less inference time.

A User-Adaptive Layer Selection Framework for Very Deep Sequential Recommender Models

Recently proposed knowledge distillation approaches based on feature-map transfer validate that intermediate layers of a teacher model can serve as effective targets for training a student model to obtain better generalization ability. Existing studies mainly focus on particular representation forms for knowledge transfer between manually specified pairs of teacher-student intermediate layers. However, semantics of intermediate layers may vary in different networks and manual association of layers might lead to negative regularization caused by semantic mismatch between certain teacher-student layer pairs. To address this problem, we propose Semantic Calibration for Cross-layer Knowledge Distillation (SemCKD), which automatically assigns proper target layers of the teacher model for each student layer with an attention mechanism. With a learned attention distribution, each student layer distills knowledge contained in multiple layers rather than a single fixed intermediate layer from the teacher model for appropriate cross-layer supervision in training. Consistent improvements over state-of-the-art approaches are observed in extensive experiments with various network architectures for teacher and student models, demonstrating the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed attention based soft layer association mechanism for cross-layer distillation.

Cross-Layer Distillation with Semantic Calibration

Traffic forecasting is attracting considerable interest due to its widespread application in intelligent transportation systems. Given the complex and dynamic traffic data, many methods focus on how to establish a spatial-temporal model to express the non-stationary traffic patterns. Recently, the latest Graph Convolution Network (GCN) has been introduced to learn spatial features while the time neural networks are used to learn temporal features. These GCN based methods obtain state-of-the-art performance. However, the current GCN based methods ignore the natural hierarchical structure of traffic systems which is composed of the micro layers of road networks and the macro layers of region networks, in which the nodes are obtained through pooling method and could include some hot traffic regions such as downtown and CBD etc., while the current GCN is only applied on the micro graph of road networks. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Graph Convolution Networks (HGCN) for traffic forecasting by operating on both the micro and macro traffic graphs. The proposed method is evaluated on two complex city traffic speed datasets. Compared to the latest GCN based methods like Graph WaveNet, the proposed HGCN gets higher traffic forecasting precision with lower computational cost.The website of the code is https://github.com/guokan987/HGCN.git.

Hierarchical Graph Convolution Network for Traffic Forecasting

Dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) and its extensions are data-driven methods that have substantially contributed to our understanding of dynamical systems. However, because DMD and most of its extensions are deterministic, it is difficult to treat probabilistic representations of parameters and predictions. In this work, we propose a novel formulation of a Bayesian DMD model. Our Bayesian DMD model is consistent with the procedure of standard DMD, which is to first determine the subspace of observations, and then compute the modes on that subspace. Variational matrix factorization makes it possible to realize a fully-Bayesian scheme of DMD. Moreover, we derive a Bayesian DMD model for incomplete data, which demonstrates the advantage of probabilistic modeling. Finally, both of nonlinear simulated and real-world datasets are used to illustrate the potential of the proposed method.

Bayesian Dynamic Mode Decomposition with Variational Matrix Factorization

Many challenging partially observable reinforcement learning problems have sparse rewards and most existing model-free algorithms struggle with such reward sparsity. In this paper, we propose a novel reward shaping approach to infer the intrinsic rewards for the agent from a sequential generative model. Specifically, the sequential generative model processes a sequence of partial observations and actions from the agent's historical transitions to compile a belief state for performing forward dynamics prediction. Then we utilize the error of the dynamics prediction task to infer the intrinsic rewards for the agent. Our proposed method is able to derive intrinsic rewards that could better reflect the agent's surprise or curiosity over its ground-truth state by taking a sequential inference procedure. Furthermore, we formulate the inference procedure for dynamics prediction as a multi-step forward prediction task, where the time abstraction that has been incorporated could effectively help to increase the expressiveness of the intrinsic reward signals. To evaluate our method, we conduct extensive experiments on challenging 3D navigation tasks in ViZDoom and DeepMind Lab. Empirical evaluation results show that our proposed exploration method could lead to significantly faster convergence than various state-of-the-art exploration approaches in the testified navigation domains.

Sequential Generative Exploration Model for Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning

Transfer learning, which is to improve the learning performance in the target domain by leveraging useful knowledge from the source domain, often requires that those two domains are very close, which limits its application scope. Recently, distant transfer learning has been studied to transfer knowledge between two distant or even totally unrelated domains via unlabeled auxiliary domains that act as a bridge in the spirit of human transitive inference that two completely unrelated concepts can be connected through gradual knowledge transfer. In this paper, we study distant transfer learning by proposing a DeEp Random Walk basEd distaNt Transfer (DERWENT) method. Different from existing distant transfer learning models that  implicitly identify the path of knowledge transfer between the source and target instances through auxiliary instances, the proposed DERWENT model can explicitly learn such paths via the deep random walk technique. Specifically, based on sequences identified by the random walk technique on a data graph where source and target data have no direct connection, the proposed DERWENT model enforces adjacent data points in a sequence to be similar, makes the ending data point be represented by other data points in the same sequence, and considers weighted classification losses of source data. Empirical studies on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed DERWENT algorithm yields the state-of-the-art performance.

Distant Transfer Learning via Deep Random Walk

We study the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with composite and anonymous feedback. In this model, the reward of pulling an arm spreads over a period of time (we call this period as reward interval) and the player receives partial rewards of the action, convoluted with rewards from pulling other arms, successively. Existing results on this model require prior knowledge about the reward interval size as an input to their algorithms. In this paper, we propose adaptive algorithms for both the stochastic and the adversarial cases, without requiring any prior information about the reward interval. For the stochastic case, we prove that our algorithm guarantees a regret  that matches the lower bounds (in order). For the adversarial case, we propose the first algorithm to jointly handle non-oblivious adversary and unknown reward interval size. We also conduct simulations based on real-world dataset. The results show that  our algorithms outperform existing benchmarks.

Adaptive Algorithms for Multi-Armed Bandit with Composite and Anonymous Feedback

Code generation aims to automatically generate a piece of code given an input natural language utterance. Currently, among dominant models, it is treated as a sequence-to-tree task, where a decoder outputs a sequence of actions corresponding to the pre-order traversal of an Abstract Syntax Tree. However, such a decoder only exploits the pre-order traversal based preceding actions, which are insufficient to ensure correct action predictions. In this paper, we first throughly analyze the context modeling difference between neural code generation models with different traversals based decodings (preorder traversal vs breadth-first traversal), and then propose to introduce a mutual learning framework to jointly train these models. Under this framework, we continuously enhance both two models via mutual distillation, which involves synchronous executions of two one-to-one knowledge transfers at each training step. More specifically, we alternately choose one model as the student and the other as its teacher, and require the student to fit the training data and the action prediction distributions of its teacher. By doing so, both models can fully absorb the knowledge from each other and thus could be improved simultaneously. Experimental results and in-depth analysis on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We release our
code at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/CGML.

Improving Tree-Structured Decoder Training for Code Generation via Mutual Learning

The interactive recommender systems involve users in the recommendation procedure by receiving timely user feedback to update the recommendation policy. Therefore, they are widely used in real application scenarios. Previous interactive recommendation methods primarily focus on learning users' personalized preferences on the relevance properties of an item set. However, the investigation of users' personalized preferences on the diversity properties of an item set is usually ignored. To overcome this problem, we propose the Linear Modular Dispersion Bandit (LMDB) framework, which is an online learning setting for optimizing a combination of modular functions and dispersion functions. Specifically, LMDB employs modular functions to model the relevance properties of each item, and dispersion functions to describe the diversity properties of an item set. Moreover, we also develop a learning algorithm, called Linear Modular Dispersion Hybrid (LMDH) to solve the LMDB problem and derive a gap-free bound on its n-step regret. Extensive experiments on real datasets are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed LMDB framework in balancing the recommendation accuracy and diversity.

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