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Query understanding plays a key role in exploring users’ search intents. However, it is inherently challenging since it needs to capture semantic information from short and ambiguous queries and often requires massive task-specific labeled data. In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have advanced various natural language processing tasks because they can extract general semantic information from large-scale corpora. However, directly applying them to query understanding is sub-optimal because existing strategies rarely consider to boost the search performance. On the other hand, search logs contain user clicks between queries and urls that provide rich users’ search behavioral information on queries beyond their content. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to fill this gap by exploring search logs. In particular, we propose a novel graph-enhanced pre-training framework, GE-BERT, which leverages both query content and the query graph to capture both semantic information and users’ search behavioral information of queries. Extensive experiments on offline and online tasks have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework. 

As widely used in data-driven decision-making, recommender systems have been recognized for their capabilities to provide users with personalized services in many user-oriented online services, such as E-commerce (e.g., Amazon, Taobao, etc.) and Social Media sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter). Recent works have shown that deep neural networks-based recommender systems are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where adversaries can inject carefully crafted fake user profiles (i.e., a set of items that fake users have interacted with) into a target recommender system to promote or demote a set of target items. Instead of generating users with fake profiles from scratch, in this paper, we introduce a novel strategy to obtain “fake” user profiles via copying cross-domain user profiles, where a reinforcement learning-based black-box attacking framework (CopyAttack+) is developed to effectively and efficiently select cross-domain user profiles from the source domain to attack the target system. Moreover, we propose to train a local surrogate system for mimicking adversarial black-box attacks in the source domain, so as to provide transferable signals with the purpose of enhancing the attacking strategy in the target black-box recommender system. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attacking framework. 

Knowledge graphs (KGs) facilitate a wide variety of applications. Despite great efforts in creation and maintenance, even the largest KGs are far from complete. Hence, KG completion (KGC) has become one of the most crucial tasks for KG research. Recently, considerable literature in this space has centered around the use of Message Passing (Graph) Neural Networks (MPNNs), to learn powerful embeddings. The success of these methods is naturally attributed to the use of MPNNs over simpler multi-layer perceptron (MLP) models, given their additional message passing (MP) component. In this work, we find that surprisingly, simple MLP models are able to achieve comparable performance to MPNNs, suggesting that MP may not be as crucial as previously believed. With further exploration, we show careful scoring function and loss function design has a much stronger influence on KGC model performance. This suggests a conflation of scoring function design, loss function design, and MP in prior work, with promising insights regarding the scalability of state-of-the-art KGC methods today, as well as careful attention to more suitable MP designs for KGC tasks tomorrow. Our codes are publicly available at: https://github.com/Juanhui28/Are_MPNNs_helpful. 

Communication compression has become a key strategy to speed up distributed optimization. However, existing decentralized algorithms with compression mainly focus on compressing DGD-type algorithms. They are unsatisfactory in terms of convergence rate, stability, and the capability to handle heterogeneous data. Motivated by primal-dual algorithms, this paper proposes the first \underline{L}in\underline{EA}r convergent \underline{D}ecentralized algorithm with compression, LEAD. Our theory describes the coupled dynamics of the inexact primal and dual update as well as compression error, and we provide the first consensus error bound in such settings without assuming bounded gradients. Experiments on convex problems validate our theoretical analysis, and empirical study on deep neural nets shows that LEAD is applicable to non-convex problems.