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ACM SIGSPATIAL 20222022Understanding and representing real-world places (physical locations where drivers can deliver packages) is key to successfully and efficiently delivering packages to customer’s doorstep. Prerequisite to this is the task of capturing similarity and relatedness between places. Intuitively, places that belong to a same building should have similar characteristics in geospatial as well as textual space. However
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ColdGuess: A general and effective relational graph convolutional network to tackle cold start casesKDD 2022 Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs2022Low-quality listings and bad actor behavior in online retail websites threatens e-commerce business as these result in sub-optimal buying experience and erode customer trust. When a new listing is created, how to tell it has good quality? Is the method effective, fast, and scalable? Previous approaches often face three limitations/challenges: (1) unable to handle cold start problems where new sellers/listings
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RecSys 2022 Workshop on CONSEQUENCES – Causality, Counterfactuals and Sequential Decision-Making2022Adaptive experimental design methods are increasingly being used in industry as a tool to boost testing throughput or reduce experimentation cost relative to traditional A/B/N testing methods. This paper shares lessons learned regarding the challenges and pitfalls of naively using adaptive experimentation systems in industrial settings where non-stationarity is prevalent, while also providing perspectives
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UAI 20222022Despite the increasing relevance of forecasting methods, causal implications of these algorithms remain largely unexplored. This is concerning considering that, even under simplifying assumptions such as causal sufficiency, the statistical risk of a model can differ significantly from its causal risk. Here, we study the problem of causal generalization—generalizing from the observational to interventional
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Recsys 2022 Workshop on Multi-Objective Recommender Systems2022Recommendations systems play a central role in improving customer experience on the Amazon retail website. Commonly, Learning-to-Rank (LTR) methods are employed to rank content, however these methods are subject to bias inherent in the observational data that they use for training. This paper studies a domain-specific self-selection bias, called Content Targeting Bias, introduced when content is generated
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January 30, 2019Many of today’s most popular AI systems are, at their core, classifiers. They classify inputs into different categories: this image is a picture of a dog, not a cat; this audio signal is an instance of the word “Boston”, not the word “Seattle”; this sentence is a request to play a video, not a song. But what happens if you need to add a new class to your classifier — if, say, someone releases a new type of automated household appliance that your smart-home system needs to be able to control?
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January 24, 2019Machine learning systems often act on “features” extracted from input data. In a natural-language-understanding system, for instance, the features might include words’ parts of speech, as assessed by an automatic syntactic parser, or whether a sentence is in the active or passive voice.
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January 22, 2019Developing a new natural-language-understanding system usually requires training it on thousands of sample utterances, which can be costly and time-consuming to collect and annotate. That’s particularly burdensome for small developers, like many who have contributed to the library of more than 70,000 third-party skills now available for Alexa.
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Projection image adapted from Michael Horvath under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licenseJanuary 15, 2019Neural networks have been responsible for most of the top-performing AI systems of the past decade, but they tend to be big, which means they tend to be slow. That’s a problem for systems like Alexa, which depend on neural networks to process spoken requests in real time. -
December 21, 2018In May 2018, Amazon launched Alexa’s Remember This feature, which enables customers to store “memories” (“Alexa, remember that I took Ben’s watch to the repair store”) and recall them later by asking open-ended questions (“Alexa, where is Ben’s watch?”).
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December 18, 2018At a recent press event on Alexa's latest features, Alexa’s head scientist, Rohit Prasad, mentioned multistep requests in one shot, a capability that allows you to ask Alexa to do multiple things at once. For example, you might say, “Alexa, add bananas, peanut butter, and paper towels to my shopping list.” Alexa should intelligently figure out that “peanut butter” and “paper towels” name two items, not four, and that bananas are a separate item.