1 May 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering
Existing recommendation methods usually train several independent modules for each rating information instead of an end-to-end manner. Therefore, these methods may be incapable of collaborative learning leading to sub-optimal results in predicting users' overall interests. The main disadvantage of those two-stage methods is that the overall rating heavily relies on the predicted sub-ratings, and the predictive error of sub-ratings is accumulated during the regression step. Moreover, the regression model is trained with unbiased sub-ratings but used with biased predictive sub-ratings. Meanwhile, the separate training pattern induces more training overhead. To address these problems, we propose a collective model to predict a user's overall rating, which can learn each of the multi-criteria sub-scores simultaneously in an end-to-end manner. This enables the proposed method to improve its prediction quality by transferring the knowledge of criterion to the domain of overall ratings. It reduces the dependence of the predicted score of a specific criterion, making the overall system more robust. In addition, our end-to-end method avoids learning the regress part directly from the unbiased sub-ratings, improving the performance of the overall model. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that our proposed architecture achieves up to 13.14% lower prediction error over baseline approaches.
29 August 2023 in Data Science and Engineering
User-generated content is daily produced in social media, as such user interest summarization is critical to distill salient information from massive information for recommendation tasks. While the interested messages (e.g., tags or posts) from a single user are usually sparse becoming a bottleneck for existing methods, we propose a neural inference method (NIGraphNet) by mining user social interest for item recommendation. It can unearth user latent topics combined with user relation learning. Specifically, we exploit a neural variational inference approach to learn the distributions between user interests and hidden topics. (We denote it as interest-topic distributions in the following.) Then, we adopt a unified graph-based training loss that jointly learns the hidden topics and user relations for item recommendation. Experiments on two datasets collected from well-known social media platforms demonstrate the superior performance of our model in the tasks of user interest summarization and item recommendation. Further discussions also show that exploiting the latent topic representations and user relations is conducive to the user’s automatic language understanding.
7 November 2024 in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
The multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre has gained significant popularity and economic success, attracting considerable research interest within the Human-Computer Interaction community. Enhancing the gaming experience requires a deep understanding of player behavior, and a crucial aspect of MOBA games is matchmaking, which aims to assemble teams of comparable skill levels. However, existing matchmaking systems often neglect important factors such as players' position preferences and team assignment, resulting in imbalanced matches and reduced player satisfaction. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel framework called CUPID, which introduces a novel process called ''re-matchmaking'' to optimize team and position assignments to improve both fairness and player satisfaction. CUPID incorporates a pre-filtering step to ensure a minimum level of matchmaking quality, followed by a pre-match win-rate prediction model that evaluates the fairness of potential assignments. By simultaneously considering players' position satisfaction and game fairness, CUPID aims to provide an enhanced matchmaking experience. Extensive experiments were conducted on two large-scale, real-world MOBA datasets to validate the effectiveness of CUPID. The results surpass all existing state-of-the-art baselines, with an average relative improvement of 7.18% in terms of win prediction accuracy. Furthermore, CUPID has been successfully deployed in a popular online MOBA game. The deployment resulted in significant improvements in match fairness and player satisfaction, as evidenced by critical Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) metrics covering usability, accessibility, and engagement, observed through A/B testing. To the best of our knowledge, Cupid is the first re-matchmaking system designed specifically for large-scale MOBA games.