Deep Reinforcement Learning based Recommendation (DRR) 
Recommendation is crucial in both academia and industry, and various techniques are proposed such as content-based collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, logistic regression, factorization machines, neural networks and multi-armed bandits. However, most of the previous studies suffer from two limitations: (1) considering the recommendation as a static procedure and ignoring the dynamic interactive nature between users and the recommender systems, (2) focusing on the immediate feedback of recommended items and neglecting the long-term rewards. To address the two limitations, in this paper we propose a novel recommendation framework based on deep reinforcement learning, called DRR. The DRR framework treats recommendation as a sequential decision making procedure and adopts an ‘Actor-Critic’ reinforcement learning scheme to model the interactions between the users and recommender systems, which can consider both the dynamic adaptation and long-term rewards. Furthermore, a state representation module is incorporated into DRR, which can explicitly capture the interactions between items and users. Three instantiation structures are developed. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets are conducted under both the offline and online evaluation settings. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed DRR method indeed outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors. …
Deep Learning
Deep learning is a set of algorithms in machine learning that attempt to model high-level abstractions in data by using architectures composed of multiple non-linear transformations. Deep learning is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on learning representations. An observation (e.g., an image) can be represented in many ways (e.g., a vector of pixels), but some representations make it easier to learn tasks of interest (e.g., is this the image of a human face?) from examples, and research in this area attempts to define what makes better representations and how to create models to learn these representations. Various deep learning architectures such as deep neural networks, convolutional deep neural networks, and deep belief networks have been applied to fields like computer vision, automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, and music/audio signal recognition where they have been shown to produce state-of-the-art results on various tasks. …
Centralized Coordinate Learning (CCL)
Owe to the rapid development of deep neural network (DNN) techniques and the emergence of large scale face databases, face recognition has achieved a great success in recent years. During the training process of DNN, the face features and classification vectors to be learned will interact with each other, while the distribution of face features will largely affect the convergence status of network and the face similarity computing in test stage. In this work, we formulate jointly the learning of face features and classification vectors, and propose a simple yet effective centralized coordinate learning (CCL) method, which enforces the features to be dispersedly spanned in the coordinate space while ensuring the classification vectors to lie on a hypersphere. An adaptive angular margin is further proposed to enhance the discrimination capability of face features. Extensive experiments are conducted on six face benchmarks, including those have large age gap and hard negative samples. Trained only on the small-scale CASIA Webface dataset with 460K face images from about 10K subjects, our CCL model demonstrates high effectiveness and generality, showing consistently competitive performance across all the six benchmark databases. …
Fast-Node2Vec
Node2Vec is a state-of-the-art general-purpose feature learning method for network analysis. However, current solutions cannot run Node2Vec on large-scale graphs with billions of vertices and edges, which are common in real-world applications. The existing distributed Node2Vec on Spark incurs significant space and time overhead. It runs out of memory even for mid-sized graphs with millions of vertices. Moreover, it considers at most 30 edges for every vertex in generating random walks, causing poor result quality. In this paper, we propose Fast-Node2Vec, a family of efficient Node2Vec random walk algorithms on a Pregel-like graph computation framework. Fast-Node2Vec computes transition probabilities during random walks to reduce memory space consumption and computation overhead for large-scale graphs. The Pregel-like scheme avoids space and time overhead of Spark’s read-only RDD structures and shuffle operations. Moreover, we propose a number of optimization techniques to further reduce the computation overhead for popular vertices with large degrees. Empirical evaluation show that Fast-Node2Vec is capable of computing Node2Vec on graphs with billions of vertices and edges on a mid-sized machine cluster. Compared to Spark-Node2Vec, Fast-Node2Vec achieves 7.7–122x speedups. …
Source: Data Analytics & R