Related papers: Temporally and Distributionally Robust Optimizatio…
Recommender systems play an essential role in online services by providing personalized item lists to support users' decision-making processes. While collaborative filtering methods can achieve high accuracy, it is crucial to consider not…
A central goal of machine learning is to learn robust representations that capture the causal relationship between inputs features and output labels. However, minimizing empirical risk over finite or biased datasets often results in models…
Recommending cold-start items is a long-standing and fundamental challenge in recommender systems. Without any historical interaction on cold-start items, CF scheme fails to use collaborative signals to infer user preference on these items.…
Sequential recommendation (SR) models are typically trained on user-item interactions which are affected by the system exposure bias, leading to the user preference learned from the biased SR model not being fully consistent with the true…
Collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems struggle with making predictions on unseen, or 'cold', items. Systems designed to address this challenge are often trained with supervision from warm CF models in order to leverage…
To train machine learning models that are robust to distribution shifts in the data, distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has been proven very effective. However, the existing approaches to learning a distributionally robust model…
Stochastic Optimization (SO) is a classical approach for optimization under uncertainty that typically requires knowledge about the probability distribution of uncertain parameters. As the latter is often unknown, Distributionally Robust…
As recommender systems are indispensable in various domains such as job searching and e-commerce, providing equitable recommendations to users with different sensitive attributes becomes an imperative requirement. Prior approaches for…
Cold-start is a very common and still open problem in the Recommender Systems literature. Since cold start items do not have any interaction, collaborative algorithms are not applicable. One of the main strategies is to use pure or hybrid…
A common goal in statistics and machine learning is to learn models that can perform well against distributional shifts, such as latent heterogeneous subpopulations, unknown covariate shifts, or unmodeled temporal effects. We develop and…
Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most commonly used recommendation methods. CF consists in predicting whether, or how much, a user will like (or dislike) an item by leveraging the knowledge of the user's preferences as well as…
Temporal distribution shift (TDS) erodes the long-term accuracy of recommender systems, yet industrial practice still relies on periodic incremental training, which struggles to capture both stable and transient patterns. Existing…
Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to respond correctly to prompts that align well with the data they were trained and fine-tuned on. Yet, small shifts in wording, format, or language can trigger surprisingly large failures, especially on…
Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) provides a framework for decision-making under distributional uncertainty, yet its effectiveness can be compromised by outliers in the training data. This paper introduces a principled approach to…
Stochastic and (distributionally) robust optimization problems often become computationally challenging as the number of scenarios or data points increases. Scenario reduction is therefore a key technique for improving tractability. We…
It is well known that collaborative filtering (CF) based recommender systems provide better modeling of users and items associated with considerable rating history. The lack of historical ratings results in the user and the item cold-start…
While traditional Deep Learning (DL) optimization methods treat all training samples equally, Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) adaptively assigns importance weights to different samples. However, a significant gap exists between…
Many machine learning tasks involve subpopulation shift where the testing data distribution is a subpopulation of the training distribution. For such settings, a line of recent work has proposed the use of a variant of empirical risk…
Providing personalized recommendations in an environment where items exhibit ephemerality and temporal relevancy (e.g. in social media) presents a few unique challenges: (1) inductively understanding ephemeral appeal for items in a setting…
This study reveals the inherent tolerance of contrastive learning (CL) towards sampling bias, wherein negative samples may encompass similar semantics (\eg labels). However, existing theories fall short in providing explanations for this…