WWW 2025 论文列表

ACM Web Conference

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409篇论文

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    15537.9%
  • Poster
    25462.1%

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Learning Feasible Causal Algorithmic Recourse: A Prior Structural Knowledge Free Approach

Haotian Wang, Hao Zou, Xueguang Zhou, Shangwen Wang, Wenjing Yang, Peng Cui

展开摘要

Algorithmic recourse (AR) has made significant progress by identifying small perturbations in input features that can alter predictions, which provide a data-centric approach to understand decisions from diverse black-box models on the Web. Towards the feasibility issue, i.e., whether the recoursed examples provides actionable and reliable recommendations to end-users, causal algorithmic recourse have incorporated structural causal model (SCM) to preserve the realistic constraints among input features. For instance, preserving structural causal knowledge between "age" and "educational level" can avoid generating samples with decreasing age and increasing educational level. However, previous causal AR methods suffer from the requirement of prior structural causal knowledge, e.g., prior causal graph or the whole SCM, which restricts the realistic application of causal AR methods. To bridge this gap, we aim to develop a novel framework for causal algorithmic recourse that does not rely on neither prior causal graph or prior SCM. Since identifying counterfactuals without causal graph is impossible, we instead propose to approximate and constrain the variation of the perturbed components, i.e., the exogenous noise variables, by formulating the generation of AR as the structure-preserving intervention. With the aid of development in non-linear Independent Component Analysis (ICA), our method can further achieve theoretically guaranteed constraints on such variation of exogeneous variables. Experimental results on synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods without any prior causal graph or SCM knowledge.

Poster
UniGO: A Unified Graph Neural Network for Modeling Opinion Dynamics on Graphs

Hao Li, Hao Jiang, Yuke Zheng, Hao Sun, Wenying Gong

展开摘要

Polarization and fragmentation in social media amplify user biases, making it increasingly important to understand the evolution of opinions. Opinion dynamics provide interpretability for studying opinion evolution, yet incorporating these insights into predictive models remains challenging. This challenge arises due to the inherent complexity of social interactions, the diversity of opinion fusion rules, and the difficulty in capturing equilibrium states while avoiding over-smoothing. This paper introduces UniGO, a unified framework for modeling opinion evolution on graphs. By abstracting various opinion dynamics models into a unified graph-based structure, UniGO captures both common features and complex fusion rules. Using a coarsen-refine mechanism, UniGO efficiently models opinion dynamics through a graph neural network, mitigating over-smoothing while preserving equilibrium phenomena. Additionally, UniGO leverages pretraining on synthetic datasets, which enhances its ability to generalize to real-world scenarios, providing a viable paradigm for large-scale applications of opinion dynamics. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate UniGO's effectiveness in capturing complex opinion formation processes and predicting future evolution. The pretrained model also shows strong generalization capability, validating the benefits of using synthetic data to boost real-world performance.

Oral
Distributionally Robust Graph Out-of-Distribution Recommendation via Diffusion Model

Chu Zhao, Enneng Yang, Yuliang Liang, Jianzhe Zhao, Guibing Guo, Xingwei Wang

展开摘要

The distributionally robust optimization (DRO)-based graph neural network methods improve recommendation systems’ out-of- distribution (OOD) generalization by optimizing the model’s worst-case performance. However, these studies fail to consider the impact of noisy samples in the training data, which results in diminished generalization capabilities and lower accuracy. Through experimental and theoretical analysis, this paper reveals that current DRO-based graph recommendation methods assign greater weightto noise distribution, leading to model parameter learning being dominated by it. When the model overly focuses on fitting noise samples in the training data, it may learn irrelevant or meaningless features that cannot be generalized to OOD data. To address this challenge, we design a Distributionally Robust Graph model for OOD recommendation (DRGO). Specifically, our method first employs a simple and effective diffusion paradigm to alleviate the noisy effect in the latent space. Additionally, an entropy regularization term is introduced in the DRO objective function to avoid extreme sample weights in the worst-case distribution. Finally, we provide a theoretical proof of the generalization error bound of DRGO as well as a theoretical analysis of how our approach mitigates noisy sample effects, which helps to better understand the proposed framework from a theoretical perspective. We conductextensive experiments on four datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our framework against three typical distribution shifts, and the results demonstrate its superiority in both independently and identically distributed distributions (IID) and OOD.

Poster
Behavioral Homophily in Social Media via Inverse Reinforcement Learning: A Reddit Case Study

Lanqin Yuan, Philipp J. Schneider, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu

展开摘要

Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily, plays a key role in the formation of echo chambers which further amplify polarization and division. Existing works examining homophily in online communities traditionally infer it using content- or adjacency-based approaches, such as constructing explicit interaction networks or performing topic analysis. These methods fall short for platforms where interaction networks cannot be easily constructed and fail to capture the complex nature of user interactions across the platform. This work introduces a novel approach for quantifying user homophily. We first use an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) framework to infer users' policies, then use these policies as a measure of behavioral homophily. We apply our method to Reddit, conducting a case study across 5.9 million interactions over six years, demonstrating how this approach uncovers distinct behavioral patterns and user roles that vary across different communities. We further validate our behavioral homophily measure against traditional content-based homophily, offering a powerful method for analyzing social media dynamics and their broader societal implications. We find, among others, that users can behave very similarly (high behavioral homophily) when discussing entirely different topics like soccer vs e-sports (low topical homophily), and that there is an entire class of users on Reddit whose purpose seems to be to disagree with others.

Oral
Human-Centric Community Detection in Hybrid Metaverse Networks with Integrated AI Entities

Shih-Hsuan Chiu, Ya-Wen Teng, De-Nian Yang, Ming-Syan Chen

展开摘要

Community detection is a cornerstone problem in social network analysis (SNA), aimed at identifying cohesive communities with minimal external links. However, the rise of generative AI and the Metaverse introduces new complexities by creating hybrid communities of human users and AI entities. Traditional community detection approaches that overlook the interwoven presence of humans and AIs are inadequate for managing such hybrid networks, known as human-AI social networks (denoted by HASNs), especially when prioritizing human-centric communities. This paper introduces a novel community detection problem in HASNs (denoted by MetaCD), which seeks to enhance human connectivity within communities while reducing the presence of AI nodes. Effective processing of MetaCD poses challenges due to the delicate trade-off between excluding AI nodes and maintaining community structure. To address this, we propose CUSA, an innovative framework incorporating AI-aware clustering techniques that navigate this trade-off by selectively retaining AI nodes that contribute to community integrity. Furthermore, given the scarcity of real-world HASNs, we design four strategies for synthesizing these networks under various hypothetical scenarios. Empirical evaluations on real social networks, reconfigured as HASNs, demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our approach compared to traditional non-deep learning and graph neural network (GNN)-based methods.

Poster
WebCode2M: A Real-World Dataset for Code Generation from Webpage Designs

Yi Gui, Zhen Li, Yao Wan, Yemin Shi, Hongyu Zhang, Yi Su, Bohua Chen, Dongping Chen, Siyuan Wu, Xing Zhou, Wenbin Jiang, Hai Jin, Xiangliang Zhang

展开摘要

Automatically generating webpage code from webpage designs can significantly reduce the workload of front-end developers, and recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising potential in this area. However, our investigation re- veals that most existing MLLMs are constrained by the absence of high-quality, large-scale, real-word datasets, resulting in inadequate performance in automated webpage code generation. To fill this gap, this paper introduces WebCode2M, a new dataset comprising 2.56 million instances, each containing a design image along with the corresponding webpage code and layout details. Sourced from real- world web resources, WebCode2M offers a rich and valuable dataset for webpage code generation across a variety of user scenarios. The dataset quality is ensured by a highly accurate scoring model that filters out instances with aesthetic deficiencies or other incomplete elements. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed dataset, we introduce a baseline model based on the Vision Transformer (ViT), named WebCoder, and establish a benchmark for fair comparison. Additionally, we introduce a new metric, TreeBLEU, to measure the structural hierarchy recall. The benchmarking results demonstrate that our dataset significantly improves the ability of MLLMs to gen- erate code from webpage designs, confirming its effectiveness and usability for future applications in front-end design tools. Finally, we highlight several practical challenges introduced by our dataset, calling for further research. We have hosted the WebCode2M on an anonymous webpage: https://webcode2m-anonymous.github.io.

Oral
Self-Comparison for Dataset-Level Membership Inference in Large (Vision-)Language Model

Jie Ren, Kangrui Chen, Chen Chen, Vikash Sehwag, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang, Lingjuan Lyu

展开摘要

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made significant advancements in a wide range of natural language processing and vision-language tasks. Access to large web-scale datasets has been a key factor in their success. However, concerns have been raised about the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials and potential copyright infringement. Existing methods, such as sample-level Membership Inference Attacks (MIA) and distribution-based dataset, inference distinguish member and non-member data by leveraging the common observation that models tend to memorize and show greater confidence in member data. Nevertheless, these methods face challenges when applied to LLMs and VLMs, such as the requirement for ground-truth member data or non-member data that shares the same distribution as the test data. In this paper, we propose a novel dataset-level membership inference method based on Self-Comparison. We find that a member prefix followed by a non-member suffix (paraphrased from a member suffix) can further trigger the model's memorization on training data. Instead of directly comparing member and non-member data, we introduce paraphrasing to the second half of the sequence and evaluate how the likelihood changes before and after paraphrasing. Unlike prior approaches, our method does not require access to ground-truth member data or non-member data in identical distribution, making it more practical. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms traditional MIA and dataset inference techniques across various datasets and models, including GPT-4o.

Oral
Assessing and Post-Processing Black Box Large Language Models for Knowledge Editing

Xiaoshuai Song, Zhengyang Wang, Keqing He, Guanting Dong, Yutao Mou, Jinxu Zhao, Weiran Xu

展开摘要

The rapid evolution of the Web as a key platform for information dissemination has led to the growing integration of large language models (LLMs) in Web-based applications. However, the swift changes in web content present challenges in maintaining these models' relevance and accuracy. The task of Knowledge Editing (KE) is aimed at efficiently and precisely adjusting the behavior of large language models (LLMs) to update specific knowledge while minimizing any adverse effects on other knowledge. Current research predominantly concentrates on editing white-box LLMs, neglecting a significant scenario: editing black-box LLMs, where access is limited to interfaces and only textual output is provided. In this paper, we initially officially introduce KE on black-box LLMs, followed by presenting a thorough evaluation framework. This framework operates without requiring logits and considers pre- and post-edit consistency, addressing the limitations of current evaluations that are inadequate for black-box LLMs editing and lack comprehensiveness. To address privacy leaks of editing data and style over-editing in existing approaches, we propose a new postEdit framework. postEdit incorporates a retrieval mechanism for editing knowledge and a purpose-trained editing plugin called post-editor, ensuring privacy through downstream processing and maintaining textual style consistency via fine-grained editing. Experiments and analysis conducted on two benchmarks show that postEdit surpasses all baselines and exhibits robust generalization, notably enhancing style retention by an average of +20.82\%. We will release our code after blind review.

Oral
SimEdge: A Scalable Transitivity-Aware Graph-Theoretic Similarity Model for Capturing Edge-to-Edge Relationships

Weiren Yu

展开摘要

Measuring similarity based on network topology is a crucial task in the realm of web search. While many well-established similarity measures (e.g. SimRank) focus on assessing node-to-node similarity, capturing edge-to-edge relationships is equally important in many applications (e.g. link spam detection). However, existing node-to-node similarity measures from the SimRank family may violate the triangular inequality. When applied directly to assessing edge-to-edge similarity, such measures may fail to capture transitive relationships and misrepresent dissimilarity between nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel similarity measure, SimEdge, which can capture transitive relationships for assessing edge-to-edge similarity. The intuition of SimEdge revolves around a mutual reinforcement co-recursion: ``two edges are assessed as similar if they are linked to similar nodes, and two nodes are assessed as similar if they are linked to similar edges.'' We show that SimEdge guarantees the transitivity of similarity, and enhances the accuracy of the node-to-node SimRank similarity without misrepresenting dissimilarity between nodes. For large-scale graphs, we also propose efficient techniques to compute SimEdge similarities in linear memory with guaranteed accuracy. Our empirical evaluation on various datasets validates that SimEdge is highly effective in capturing transitive edge-to-edge relationships, while offering a more reliable assessment of node-to-node similarity.

Oral
Unveiling Discrete Clues: Superior Healthcare Predictions for Rare Diseases

Chuang Zhao, Hui Tang, Jiheng Zhang, Xiaomeng Li

展开摘要

Accurate healthcare prediction is essential for improving patient outcomes. Existing research primarily leverages sophisticated frameworks like attention or graph neural networks to capture the intricate collaborative (CO) signals inherent in electronic health records. However, prediction for rare diseases remains challenging due to their insufficient co-occurrence. To address this issue, this paper proposes UDC, a novel method that unveils discrete clues to bridge textual knowledge and CO signals within a unified semantic space, thereby enriching the representation semantics of rare diseases. Specifically, we focus on addressing two key sub-problems: (1) acquiring distinguishable discrete codes for precise disease representation and (2) achieving semantic alignment between textual knowledge and the CO signals at the code level. For the first sub-problem, we refine the standard vector quantized (VQ) process to include condition awareness. Additionally, we develop an advanced contrastive learning approach in the decoding stage, leveraging synthetic and mixed domain targets as hard negatives to enrich the perceptibility of the reconstructed representation for downstream tasks. For the second sub-problem, we introduce a novel codebook update strategy using co-teacher distillation. This approach facilitates bidirectional supervision between textual knowledge and CO signals, thereby aligning semantically equivalent information in a shared discrete latent space. Extensive experimentation across two tasks on three datasets showcases that the proposed UDC significantly improves health prediction performance for both rare and common diseases.

Oral
Autobidding With Interdependent Values

Martino Banchio, Kshipra Bhawalkar, Christopher Liaw, Aranyak Mehta, Andres Perlroth

展开摘要

In this paper, we initiate the study of autobidding where the signals for each bidder can be noisy and correlated. Our first set of results showcases the failure of traditional auctions such as the second-price auction (SPA) and the first-price auction (FPA). In particular, uniform bidding is not an optimal bidding strategy for SPA and both SPA and FPA can have arbitrarily poor efficiency. To circumvent this, we propose the Contextual Second Price Auction (CSPA), a novel mechanism which mitigates the aforementioned adverse effects by leveraging multiple signals to adjust the allocation of SPA. We show that uniform bidding is an optimal bidding strategy in CSPA and we prove a tight bound on the price for anarchy for CSPA of $2$, thus recovering the well-established results in the independent setting. Finally, we show that CSPA always achieves at least half the welfare of SPA; moreover this is also tight.

Oral
TESA: A Trajectory and Semantic-aware Dynamic Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network

Xin Wang, Jiawei Jiang, Xiao Yan, Qiang Huang

展开摘要

Dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs) are designed to capture the dynamic evolution of graph node interactions. However, existing DGNNs mainly consider homogeneous graphs, neglecting the rich heterogeneity in node and edge types, which is prevalent for real-world graphs and essential for modeling complex dynamic interactions. In this work, we propose the **T**raj**E**ctory and **S**emantic-**A**ware dynamic heterogeneous graph neural network (**TeSa**), which integrates *trajectory-based evolution* and *semantic-aware aggregation* to capture both the evolving dynamics and heterogeneous semantics entailed in continuous-time dynamic heterogeneous graphs. In particular, trajectory-based evolution treats the interactions received by each node (called node trajectory) as a sequence and employs a temporal point process to learn the dynamic evolution in these interactions. Semantic-aware aggregation separates edges of different types when aggregating messages for each node from its neighbors. Edges of the same type are processed at first (i.e., intra-semantic aggregation), and then edges of different types are handled (i.e., inter-semantic fusion), to offer a comprehensive view of the heterogeneous semantics. We compare **TeSa** with 7 state-of-the-art DGNN models, and the results show that **TeSa** improves the best-performing baseline by an average of 5.11% and 5.74% in accuracy for transductive and inductive tasks.

Oral
Transfer Rule Learning over Large Knowledge Graphs

Hong Liu, Zhe Wang, Kewen Wang, Xiaowang Zhang, Zhiyong Feng

展开摘要

Logical rules have been widely used for expressing schema knowledge in various practical applications. It is infeasible to handcraft rules from large knowledge graphs (KGs) and thus many methods have been proposed for learning rules automatically from KGs. However, it is largely ignored how to extract rules in a (target) KG from rules that already exist in some other (source) KGs. In this paper, we propose a framework for KG rule learning based on transfer learning. A major challenge for establishing such a framework is in that a suitable alignment mechanism is required for mapping certain subgraph structures between predicates in the source KG and the target KG. Hence, our framework provides a new method for predicate mapping based on the graph-structural similarity and thus, rules in the source KG can be transferred to the target KG. As not all transferred rules are valid ones in the target KG, methods are developed for further rule evaluation. The proposed framework can be used as a standalone rule learner but more importantly, it paves a new way for enhancing the state-of-the-art rule learners for large KGs. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the new approach to rule learning, which show that rules in smaller KGs can be effectively transferred to a large KG.

Poster
Quantitative Runtime Monitoring of Ethereum Transaction Attacks

Xinyao Xu, Ziyu Mao, Jianzhong Su, Xingwei Lin, David A. Basin, Jun Sun, Jingyi Wang

展开摘要

The rapid growth of decentralized applications, while revolutionizing financial transactions, has created an attractive target for malicious attacks. Existing approaches to detecting attacks often rely on predefined rules or simplistic and overly-specialized models, which lack the flexibility to handle the wide spectrum of diverse and dynamically changing attack types. To address this challenge, we present a general, extensible framework, MoE (Monitoring Ethereum), that leverages runtime verification to detect a wide range of attacks on Ethereum. MoE features an expressive attack modeling language, based on Metric First-order Temporal Logic, that can formalize a wide range of attacks. We integrate a novel semantic lifting approach that extracts vital system behaviors for various attacks utilizing the monitoring tool MonPoly. We further equip MoE with quantitative capabilities to evaluate the similarity between a transaction and an attack formula to identify more attacks, including near-miss attacks. We carry out extensive experiments with MoE on a labeled benchmark and a large-scale dataset containing over one million transactions. On the labeled benchmark, MoE successfully detects 92.0% attacks and achieves 45.0% more recall rate than another state-of-the-art tool. MoE finds 3,319 attacks with 95.4% precision on the large dataset. Furthermore, MoE uses quantitative analysis to uncover 8% more attacks. Notably, the average time for monitoring a transaction is less than 23 ms, positioning MoE as a promising practical solution for real-time attack detection for Ethereum.

Poster
Angular Distance-Guided Neighbor Selection for Graph-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

Sungjun Jung, Yongsang Park, Haeun Lee, Young H. Oh, Jae W. Lee

展开摘要

Graph-based approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) algorithms are widely used to identify the most similar vectors to a given query vector. Graph-based ANNS consists of two stages: constructing a graph and searching on the graph for a given query vector. While reducing the query response time is of great practical importance, less attention has been paid to improving the online search method than the offline graph construction method. This paper provides an extensive experimental analysis on the popular greedy search and other search optimization strategies. We also propose a novel angular distance-guided search method for graph-based ANNS (ADA-NNS) to improve search efficiency. The key innovation of ADA-NNS is introducing a low-cost neighbor selection mechanism based on approximate similarity score derived from angular distance estimation, which effectively filters out less relevant neighbors. We compare state-of-the-art search techniques, including FINGER, on six datasets using different similarity metrics. It provides a comprehensive perspective on their tradeoffs in terms of throughput, latency, and recall. Our evaluation shows that ADA-NNS achieves 34%-107% higher queries per second (QPS) than the greedy search at 95% recall@10 on HNSW, one of the most popular graph structures for ANNS.

Poster
Beyond Utility: Evaluating LLM as Recommender

Chumeng Jiang, Jiayin Wang, Weizhi Ma, Charles L. A. Clarke, Shuai Wang, Chuhan Wu, Min Zhang

展开摘要

With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent studies employed LLMs as recommenders to provide personalized information services for distinct users. Despite efforts to improve the accuracy of LLM-based recommendation models, relatively little attention is paid to beyond-utility dimensions. Moreover, there are unique evaluation aspects of LLM-based recommendation models, which have been largely ignored. To bridge this gap, we explore four new evaluation dimensions and propose a multidimensional evaluation framework. The new evaluation dimensions include: 1) history length sensitivity, 2) candidate position bias, 3) generation-involved performance, and 4) hallucinations. All four dimensions have the potential to impact performance, but are largely unnecessary for consideration in traditional systems. Using this multidimensional evaluation framework, along with traditional aspects, we evaluate the performance of seven LLM-based recommenders, with three prompting strategies, comparing them with six traditional models on both ranking and re-ranking tasks on four datasets. We find that LLMs excel at handling tasks with prior knowledge and shorter input histories in the ranking setting, and perform better in the re-ranking setting, beating traditional models across multiple dimensions. However, LLMs exhibit substantial candidate position bias issues, and some models hallucinate non-existent items much more often than others. We intend our evaluation framework and observations to benefit future research on the use of LLMs as recommenders. The code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EvaLLMasRecommender-3118/.

Poster
Sherlock: Towards Multi-scene Video Abnormal Event Extraction and Localization via a Global-local Spatial-sensitive LLM

Junxiao Ma, Jingjing Wang, Jiamin Luo, Peiying Yu, Guodong Zhou

展开摘要

In the literature, prior studies on Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) mainly focus on detecting whether each video frame is abnormal or not in the video, which largely ignore the structured video semantic information (i.e., what, when, and where does the abnormal event happen), though this structured information could be employed to construct a more precise and efficient system for abnormal event monitoring and retrieval. With this in mind, we propose a new chat-paradigm Multi-scene Video Abnormal Event Extraction and Localization (M-VAE) task, aiming to extract the abnormal event quadruples (i.e., subject, event type, object, scene) and localize such event. Further, this paper believes that this new task faces two key challenges, i.e., global-local spatial modeling and global-local spatial balancing. To this end, this paper proposes a Global-local Spatial-sensitive Large Language Model (LLM) named Sherlock, i.e., acting like Sherlock Holmes to track down the criminal events, for this M-VAE task. Specifically, this approach designs a Global-local Spatial-enhanced MoE (GSM) module and a Spatial Imbalance Regulator (SIR) to address the above two challenges respectively. Extensive experiments on our constructed M-VAE instruction dataset show the significant advantages of Sherlock over several advanced Video-LLMs. This justifies the importance of global-local spatial information for the M-VAE task and the effectiveness of Sherlock in capturing such information.

Poster
Leveraging Invariant Principle for Heterophilic Graph Structure Distribution Shifts

Jinluan Yang, Zhengyu Chen, Teng Xiao, Yong Lin, Wenqiao Zhang, Kun Kuang

展开摘要

Heterophilic Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have shown promising results for semi-supervised learning tasks on graphs. Notably, most real-world heterophilic graphs are composed of a mixture of nodes with different neighbor patterns, exhibiting local node-level homophilic and heterophilic structures. However, existing works are only devoted to designing better unified HGNN backbones for node classification tasks on heterophilic and homophilic graph benchmarks simultaneously, and their analyses of HGNN performance concerning nodes are only based on the determined data distribution without exploring the effect caused by the difference of structural pattern between training and testing nodes. How to learn invariant node representations on heterophilic graphs to handle this structure difference or distribution shifts remains unexplored. In this paper, we first discuss the limitations of previous graph-based invariant learning methods in addressing the heterophilic graph structure distribution shifts from the perspective of data augmentation. Then, we propose HEI, a framework capable of generating invariant node representations through incorporating heterophily information, node's estimated neighbor pattern, to infer latent environments without augmentation, which are then used for invariant prediction. We provide detailed theoretical guarantees to clarify the reasonability of HEI. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks and backbones can also demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method compared with existing state-of-the-art baselines.

Oral
Relying on the Metrics of Evaluated Agents

Serena Lutong Wang, Michael Jordan, Katrina Ligett, R. Preston McAfee

展开摘要

Online platforms and regulators face a continuing problem of designing effective evaluation metrics. While tools for collecting and processing data continue to progress, this has not addressed the problem of *unknown unknowns*, or fundamental informational limitations on part of the evaluator. To guide the choice of metrics in the face of this informational problem, we turn to the evaluated agents themselves, who may have more information about how to measure their own outcomes. We model this interaction as an agency game, where we ask: *When does an agent have an incentive to reveal the observability of a metric to their evaluator?* We show that an agent will prefer to reveal metrics that differentiate the most difficult tasks from the rest, and conceal metrics that differentiate the easiest. We further show that the agent can prefer to reveal a metric *garbled* with noise over both fully concealing and fully revealing. This indicates an economic value to privacy that yields Pareto improvement for both the agent and evaluator. We demonstrate these findings on data from online rideshare platforms.

Oral
A Context-Aware Framework for Integrating Ad Auctions and Recommendations

Yuchao Ma, Weian Li, Yuejia Dou, Zhiyuan Su, Changyuan Yu, Qi Qi

展开摘要

Recently, many e-commerce platforms have favored presenting a mixed list of ads and organic content to users. The widely-used approach separately ranks ads and organic items, then sequentially inserts ads into the list of organic items. However, this method yields sub-optimal results. Firstly, it only ensures that each generated ad and organic item list achieves local optimality, while the predetermined insertion order fails to guarantee global optimality. Secondly, this approach overlooks the mutual effect between organic items and ads, resulting in an incomplete utilization of contextual information. Besides, it cannot prevent strategic behavior by advertisers. Therefore, we propose a context-aware integrated framework to address these issues. This framework applies automated mechanism design to integrated ad auctions for the first time. Specifically, it models ads and organic items simultaneously along with their contextual information and employs a learning-based approach to prevent advertisers from engaging in strategic behavior. Afterward, the framework directly generates a mixed list, enhancing the overall performance. We also propose $\textbf{T}$ransformer encoder-based $\textbf{I}$ntegrated $\textbf{C}$ontextual $\textbf{Net}$work (TICNet) to generate the optimal integrated contextual ad auction. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of TICNet on synthetic and real-world datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that TICNet significantly outperforms baseline models across multiple metrics.

Poster