Cross-Domain Collaborative Filtering (CDCF) provides a way to alleviate data sparsity and cold-start problems present in recommendation systems by exploiting the knowledge from related domains. Existing CDCF models are either based on matrix factorization or deep neural networks. Either of the techniques in isolation may result in suboptimal performance for the prediction task. Also, most of the existing models face challenges particularly in handling diversity between domains and learning complex non-linear relationships that exist amongst entities (users items) within and across domains. In this work, we propose an end-to-end neural network model -- NeuCDCF, to address these challenges in a cross-domain setting. More importantly, NeuCDCF follows a wide and deep framework and it learns the representations combinedly from both matrix factorization and deep neural networks. We perform experiments on four real-world datasets and demonstrate that our model performs better than state-of-the-art CDCF models.
On the other hand, recently, there has been a surge in methods proposed to explore deep learning networks for recommender systems @cite_42 . Most of the models in this category focus on utilizing neural network models for extracting embeddings from side information such as reviews @cite_36 , descriptions @cite_10 , content information @cite_27 , images @cite_24 and knowledge graphs @cite_32 . Nevertheless, many of these models are traces to matrix factorization models, that is, in the absence of side information, these models distill to either MF @cite_25 or PMF @cite_29 .
@cite_36 @cite_29 @cite_42 @cite_32 @cite_24 @cite_27 @cite_10 @cite_25
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Recommender systems have been studied extensively due to their practical use in real-world scenarios. Despite this, generating effective recommendations with sparse user ratings remains a challenge. Side information has been widely utilized to address rating sparsity Existing recommendation models that use side information are linear and, hence, have restricted expressiveness. Deep learning has been used to capture non-linearities by learning deep item representations from side information but as side information is high-dimensional, existing deep models tend to have large input dimensionality, which dominates their overall size. This makes them difficult to train, especially with insufficient inputs. Rather than learning item representations, in this paper, we propose to learn feature representations through deep learning from side information. Learning feature representations ensures a sufficient number of inputs to train a deep network. To achieve this, we propose to simultaneously recover user ratings and side information, by using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Specifically, user ratings and side information are encoded and decoded collectively through the same inference network and generation network. This is possible as both user ratings and side information are associated with items. To account for the heterogeneity of user ratings and side information, the final layer of the generation network follows different distributions. The proposed model is easy to implement and efficient to optimize and is shown to outperform state-of-the-art top-N recommendation methods that use side information. Recently, neuron activations extracted from a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) show promising performance in various visual tasks. However, due to the domain and task bias, using the features generated from the model pre-trained for image classification as image representations for instance retrieval is problematic. In this paper, we propose quartet-net learning to improve the discriminative power of CNN features for instance retrieval. The general idea is to map the features into a space where the image similarity can be better evaluated. Our network differs from the traditional Siamese-net in two ways. First, we adopt a double-margin contrastive loss with a dynamic margin tuning strategy to train the network which leads to more robust performance. Second, we introduce in the mimic learning regularization to improve the generalization ability of the network by preventing it from overfitting to the training data. Catering for the network learning, we collect a large-scale dataset, namely GeoPair, which consists of 68k matching image pairs and 63k non-matching pairs. Experiments on several standard instance retrieval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Deep learning is gaining importance in many applications. However, Neural Networks face several security and privacy threats. This is particularly significant in the scenario where Cloud infrastructures deploy a service with Neural Network model at the back end. Here, an adversary can extract the Neural Network parameters, infer the regularization hyperparameter, identify if a data point was part of the training data, and generate effective transferable adversarial examples to evade classifiers. This paper shows how a Neural Network model is susceptible to timing side channel attack. In this paper, a black box Neural Network extraction attack is proposed by exploiting the timing side channels to infer the depth of the network. Although, constructing an equivalent architecture is a complex search problem, it is shown how Reinforcement Learning with knowledge distillation can effectively reduce the search space to infer a target model. The proposed approach has been tested with VGG architectures on CIFAR10 data set. It is observed that it is possible to reconstruct substitute models with test accuracy close to the target models and the proposed approach is scalable and independent of type of Neural Network architectures. Despite the impressive improvements achieved by unsupervised deep neural networks in computer vision and NLP tasks, such improvements have not yet been observed in ranking for information retrieval. The reason may be the complexity of the ranking problem, as it is not obvious how to learn from queries and documents when no supervised signal is available. Hence, in this paper, we propose to train a neural ranking model using weak supervision, where labels are obtained automatically without human annotators or any external resources (e.g., click data). To this aim, we use the output of an unsupervised ranking model, such as BM25, as a weak supervision signal. We further train a set of simple yet effective ranking models based on feed-forward neural networks. We study their effectiveness under various learning scenarios (point-wise and pair-wise models) and using different input representations (i.e., from encoding query-document pairs into dense sparse vectors to using word embedding representation). We train our networks using tens of millions of training instances and evaluate it on two standard collections: a homogeneous news collection (Robust) and a heterogeneous large-scale web collection (ClueWeb). Our experiments indicate that employing proper objective functions and letting the networks to learn the input representation based on weakly supervised data leads to impressive performance, with over 13 and 35 MAP improvements over the BM25 model on the Robust and the ClueWeb collections. Our findings also suggest that supervised neural ranking models can greatly benefit from pre-training on large amounts of weakly labeled data that can be easily obtained from unsupervised IR models.