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Uncovering the Deep Filter Bubble: Narrow Exposure in Short-Video Recommendation
Mar 07, 2024
Filter bubbles have been studied extensively within the context of online content platforms due to their potential to cause undesirable outcomes such as user dissatisfaction or polarization. With the rise of short-video platforms, the filter bubble has been given extra attention because these platforms rely on an unprecedented use of the recommender system to provide relevant content. In our work, we investigate the deep filter bubble, which refers to the user being exposed to narrow content within their broad interests. We accomplish this using one-year interaction data from a top short-video platform in China, which includes hierarchical data with three levels of categories for each video. We formalize our definition of a "deep" filter bubble within this context, and then explore various correlations within the data: first understanding the evolution of the deep filter bubble over time, and later revealing some of the factors that give rise to this phenomenon, such as specific categories, user demographics, and feedback type. We observe that while the overall proportion of users in a filter bubble remains largely constant over time, the depth composition of their filter bubble changes. In addition, we find that some demographic groups that have a higher likelihood of seeing narrower content and implicit feedback signals can lead to less bubble formation. Finally, we propose some ways in which recommender systems can be designed to reduce the risk of a user getting caught in a bubble.
Large Language Model-driven Meta-structure Discovery in Heterogeneous Information Network
Feb 18, 2024Heterogeneous information networks (HIN) have gained increasing popularity for being able to capture complex relations between nodes of diverse types. Meta-structure was proposed to identify important patterns of relations on HIN, which has been proven effective for extracting rich semantic information and facilitating graph neural networks to learn expressive representations. However, hand-crafted meta-structures pose challenges for scaling up, which draws wide research attention for developing automatic meta-structure search algorithms. Previous efforts concentrate on searching for meta-structures with good empirical prediction performance, overlooking explainability. Thus, they often produce meta-structures prone to overfitting and incomprehensible to humans. To address this, we draw inspiration from the emergent reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). We propose a novel REasoning meta-STRUCTure search (ReStruct) framework that integrates LLM reasoning into the evolutionary procedure. ReStruct uses a grammar translator to encode meta-structures into natural language sentences, and leverages the reasoning power of LLMs to evaluate semantically feasible meta-structures. ReStruct also employs performance-oriented evolutionary operations. These two competing forces jointly optimize for semantic explainability and empirical performance of meta-structures. We also design a differential LLM explainer that can produce natural language explanations for the discovered meta-structures, and refine the explanation by reasoning through the search history. Experiments on five datasets demonstrate ReStruct achieve SOTA performance in node classification and link recommendation tasks. Additionally, a survey study involving 73 graduate students shows that the meta-structures and natural language explanations generated by ReStruct are substantially more comprehensible.
Large Language Models Empowered Agent-based Modeling and Simulation: A Survey and Perspectives
Dec 19, 2023Agent-based modeling and simulation has evolved as a powerful tool for modeling complex systems, offering insights into emergent behaviors and interactions among diverse agents. Integrating large language models into agent-based modeling and simulation presents a promising avenue for enhancing simulation capabilities. This paper surveys the landscape of utilizing large language models in agent-based modeling and simulation, examining their challenges and promising future directions. In this survey, since this is an interdisciplinary field, we first introduce the background of agent-based modeling and simulation and large language model-empowered agents. We then discuss the motivation for applying large language models to agent-based simulation and systematically analyze the challenges in environment perception, human alignment, action generation, and evaluation. Most importantly, we provide a comprehensive overview of the recent works of large language model-empowered agent-based modeling and simulation in multiple scenarios, which can be divided into four domains: cyber, physical, social, and hybrid, covering simulation of both real-world and virtual environments. Finally, since this area is new and quickly evolving, we discuss the open problems and promising future directions.
Large Language Model-Empowered Agents for Simulating Macroeconomic Activities
Oct 16, 2023
The advent of the Web has brought about a paradigm shift in traditional economics, particularly in the digital economy era, enabling the precise recording and analysis of individual economic behavior. This has led to a growing emphasis on data-driven modeling in macroeconomics. In macroeconomic research, Agent-based modeling (ABM) emerged as an alternative, evolving through rule-based agents, machine learning-enhanced decision-making, and, more recently, advanced AI agents. However, the existing works are suffering from three main challenges when endowing agents with human-like decision-making, including agent heterogeneity, the influence of macroeconomic trends, and multifaceted economic factors. Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained prominence in offering autonomous human-like characteristics. Therefore, leveraging LLMs in macroeconomic simulation presents an opportunity to overcome traditional limitations. In this work, we take an early step in introducing a novel approach that leverages LLMs in macroeconomic simulation. We design prompt-engineering-driven LLM agents to exhibit human-like decision-making and adaptability in the economic environment, with the abilities of perception, reflection, and decision-making to address the abovementioned challenges. Simulation experiments on macroeconomic activities show that LLM-empowered agents can make realistic work and consumption decisions and emerge more reasonable macroeconomic phenomena than existing rule-based or AI agents. Our work demonstrates the promising potential to simulate macroeconomics based on LLM and its human-like characteristics.
Alleviating Video-Length Effect for Micro-video Recommendation
Aug 31, 2023
Micro-videos platforms such as TikTok are extremely popular nowadays. One important feature is that users no longer select interested videos from a set, instead they either watch the recommended video or skip to the next one. As a result, the time length of users' watching behavior becomes the most important signal for identifying preferences. However, our empirical data analysis has shown a video-length effect that long videos are easier to receive a higher value of average view time, thus adopting such view-time labels for measuring user preferences can easily induce a biased model that favors the longer videos. In this paper, we propose a Video Length Debiasing Recommendation (VLDRec) method to alleviate such an effect for micro-video recommendation. VLDRec designs the data labeling approach and the sample generation module that better capture user preferences in a view-time oriented manner. It further leverages the multi-task learning technique to jointly optimize the above samples with original biased ones. Extensive experiments show that VLDRec can improve the users' view time by 1.81% and 11.32% on two real-world datasets, given a recommendation list of a fixed overall video length, compared with the best baseline method. Moreover, VLDRec is also more effective in matching users' interests in terms of the video content.
Learning and Optimization of Implicit Negative Feedback for Industrial Short-video Recommender System
Aug 25, 2023
Short-video recommendation is one of the most important recommendation applications in today's industrial information systems. Compared with other recommendation tasks, the enormous amount of feedback is the most typical characteristic. Specifically, in short-video recommendation, the easiest-to-collect user feedback is from the skipping behaviors, which leads to two critical challenges for the recommendation model. First, the skipping behavior reflects implicit user preferences, and thus it is challenging for interest extraction. Second, the kind of special feedback involves multiple objectives, such as total watching time, which is also very challenging. In this paper, we present our industrial solution in Kuaishou, which serves billion-level users every day. Specifically, we deploy a feedback-aware encoding module which well extracts user preference taking the impact of context into consideration. We further design a multi-objective prediction module which well distinguishes the relation and differences among different model objectives in the short-video recommendation. We conduct extensive online A/B testing, along with detailed and careful analysis, which verifies the effectiveness of our solution.
Inhomogeneous Social Recommendation with Hypergraph Convolutional Networks
Nov 05, 2021
Incorporating social relations into the recommendation system, i.e. social recommendation, has been widely studied in academic and industrial communities. While many promising results have been achieved, existing methods mostly assume that the social relations can be homogeneously applied to all the items, which is not practical for users' actually diverse preferences. In this paper, we argue that the effect of the social relations should be inhomogeneous, that is, two socially-related users may only share the same preference on some specific items, while for the other products, their preferences can be inconsistent or even contradictory. Inspired by this idea, we build a novel social recommendation model, where the traditional pair-wise "user-user'' relation is extended to the triple relation of "user-item-user''. To well handle such high-order relations, we base our framework on the hypergraph. More specifically, each hyperedge connects a user-user-item triplet, representing that the two users share similar preferences on the item. We develop a Social HyperGraph Convolutional Network (short for SHGCN) to learn from the complex triplet social relations. With the hypergraph convolutional networks, the social relations can be modeled in a more fine-grained manner, which more accurately depicts real users' preferences, and benefits the recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate our model's effectiveness. Studies on data sparsity and hyper-parameter studies further validate our model's rationality. Our codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/ziruizhu/SHGCN.
Graph Neural Networks for Recommender Systems: Challenges, Methods, and Directions
Sep 27, 2021
Recommender system is one of the most important information services on today's Internet. Recently, graph neural networks have become the new state-of-the-art approach of recommender systems. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature in graph neural network-based recommender systems. We first introduce the background and the history of the development of both recommender systems and graph neural networks. For recommender systems, in general, there are four aspects for categorizing existing works: stage, scenario, objective, and application. For graph neural networks, the existing methods consist of two categories, spectral models and spatial ones. We then discuss the motivation of applying graph neural networks into recommender systems, mainly consisting of the high-order connectivity, the structural property of data, and the enhanced supervision signal. We then systematically analyze the challenges in graph construction, embedding propagation/aggregation, model optimization, and computation efficiency. Afterward and primarily, we provide a comprehensive overview of a multitude of existing works of graph neural network-based recommender systems, following the taxonomy above. Finally, we raise discussions on the open problems and promising future directions of this area. We summarize the representative papers along with their codes repositories in https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/GNN-Recommender-Systems.