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In this article, we explain why an interventional view of recommendation provides a rigorous framework for thinking about recommender systems—enabling new insights both at a technical level for evaluation and learning, as well as at a conceptual level when we reason about the future of recommender systems. In some respects, the view of recommender systems as autonomous systems that act through their recommendations

The authors enhance pretrained language models with Securities and Exchange Commission filings data to create better language representations for features used in a predictive model. Specifically, they train RoBERTa class models with additional financial regulatory text, which they denote as a class of RoBERTa-Fin models. Using different datasets, the authors assess whether there is material improvement

The prevalence of approaches based on gradient boosted trees among the top contestants in the M5 competition is potentially the most eye-catching result. Tree-based methods out-shone other solutions, in particular deep learning-based solutions. The winners in both tracks of the M5 competition heavily relied on them. This prevalence is even more remarkable given the dominance of other methods in the literature

Automatically detecting anomalies in event data can provide substantial value in domains such as healthcare, DevOps, and information security. In this paper, we frame the problem of detecting anomalous continuous-time event sequences as out-of-distribution (OoD) detection for temporal point processes (TPPs). We show how this problem can be approached using tools from the goodness-of-fit (GoF) testing literature

Time series data are often corrupted by outliers or other kinds of anomalies. Identifying the anomalous points can be a goal on its own (anomaly detection), or a means to improving performance of other time series tasks (e.g. forecasting). Recent deep-learning-based approaches to anomaly detection and forecasting commonly assume that the proportion of anomalies in the training data is small enough to ignore

As cloud computing resources become more adopted, the infrastructures in which they are used naturally grow in the amount of resources and overall complexity, becoming harder to manage. Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is presented as a solution to this problem, allowing developers to manage and provision these cloud resources programmatically. The infrastructure is then maintained through a code base, allowing

Open-book question answering is a subset of question answering (QA) tasks where the system aims to find answers in a given set of documents (open-book) and common knowledge about a topic. This article proposes a solution for answering natural language questions from a corpus of Amazon Web Services (AWS) technical documents with no domain-specific labeled data (zero-shot). These questions have a yes–no–none

As quantum computers approach the fault tolerance threshold, diagnosing and characterizing the noise on large scale quantum devices is increasingly important. One of the most important classes of noise channels is the class of Pauli channels, for reasons of both theoretical tractability and experimental relevance. Here we present a practical algorithm for estimating the s nonzero Pauli error rates in an

Building open domain conversational systems that allow users to have engaging conversations on topics of their choice is a challenging task. The Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge was launched in 2016 to tackle the problem of achieving natural, sustained, coherent and engaging open-domain dialogs. In the fourth iteration of the competition, university teams have incorporated semantic parsing, common

We are completing the 4th year of the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge that aims to advance human-computer interaction through conversations. 9 university teams participated in this year’s challenge to create socialbots that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans on a range of current events and popular topics such as entertainment, sports, politics, technology, and fashion. The supported

The open domain-dialogue system Alquist has a goal to conduct a coherent and engaging conversation that can be considered as one of the benchmarks of social intelligence. The fourth version of the system, developed within the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4, brings two main innovations. The first addresses coherence, and the second addresses the engagingness of the conversation. For innovations

We present a chatbot implementing a novel dialogue management approach based on logical inference. Instead of framing conversation a sequence of response generation tasks, we model conversation as a collaborative inference process in which speakers share information to synthesize new knowledge in real time. Our chatbot pipeline accomplishes this modelling in three broad stages. The first stage translates

In this report, we present the DREAM 2 Socialbot design and share scientific and technology contributions made towards developing a fluent and meaningful socialbot for Alexa Prize 4. Building on top of the last year’s solution we added a rich plethora of the script-driven skills created with the help of the novel Dialogue Flow Framework. To lay down the foundation for the discourse-driven dialogue strategy

This paper describes the architecture, methodology and results of the Genuine2 chatbot for the Alexa Socialbot Grand Challenge 4. In contrast to previous years, our bot heavily relies on the usage of different types of generative models coordinated through on a dialogue management policy that targets dialogue coherence and topic continuity. Different dialogue generators were incorporated to give variability

We present Viola, an open-domain dialogue system for spoken conversation that uses a topic-agnostic dialogue manager based on a simple generate-and-rank ap- proach. Leveraging recent advances of generative dialogue systems powered by large language models, Viola fetches a batch of response candidates from various neural dialogue models trained with different datasets and knowledge-grounding inputs. Additional

Recommending sets of items that include both personalized and compatible items is crucial to personalized styling programs such as Amazon’s Personal Shopper. There is both an extensive literature on learning generic fashion compatibility and also on personalization in fashion. However, recommending pairs of items that the customer would like to wear together is still less studied as it involves learning

Training neural machine translation (NMT) models in federated learning (FL) settings could be inefficient both computationally and communication-wise, due to the large size of translation engines as well as the multiple rounds of updates required to train clients and a central server. In this paper, we explore how to efficiently build NMT models in an FL setup by proposing a novel solution. In order to

Adversarial attack on question answering systems over tabular data (TableQA) can help evaluate to what extent TableQA systems can understand natural language questions and reason with tables. However, generating natural language adversarial questions is difficult, because even a single character swap could lead to huge semantic difference in human perception. In this paper, we propose SAGE (Semantically

Many complex time series can be effectively subdivided into distinct regimes that exhibit persistent dynamics. Discovering the switching behavior and the statistical patterns in these regimes is important for understanding the underlying dynamical system. We propose the Recurrent Explicit Duration Switching Dynamical System (RED-SDS), a flexible model that is capable of identifying both state- and time-dependent

In this paper, we present the second iteration of Chirpy Cardinal, an open-domain dialogue agent developed for the Alexa Prize SGC4 competition. Building on the success of the SGC3 Chirpy, we focus on improving conversational flexibility, initiative, and coherence. We introduce a variety of methods for controllable neural generation, ranging from prefix-based neural decoding over a symbolic scaffolding,