Yoel Zeldes

We introduce a simple and efficient method, called Auxiliary Tuning, for adapting a pre-trained Language Model to a novel task; we demonstrate this approach on the task of conditional text generation. Our approach supplements the original pre-trained model with an auxiliary model that shifts the output distribution according to the target task. The auxiliary model is trained by adding its logits to the pre-trained model logits and maximizing the likelihood of the target task output. Our method… Show more

We introduce a simple and efficient method, called Auxiliary Tuning, for adapting a pre-trained Language Model to a novel task; we demonstrate this approach on the task of conditional text generation. Our approach supplements the original pre-trained model with an auxiliary model that shifts the output distribution according to the target task. The auxiliary model is trained by adding its logits to the pre-trained model logits and maximizing the likelihood of the target task output. Our method imposes no constraints on the auxiliary architecture. In particular, the auxiliary model can ingest additional input relevant to the target task, independently from the pre-trained model's input. Furthermore, mixing the models at the logits level provides a natural probabilistic interpretation of the method. Our method achieved similar results to training from scratch for several different tasks, while using significantly fewer resources for training; we share a specific example of text generation conditioned on keywords. Show less

Building robust online content recommendation systems requires learning complex interactions between user preferences and content features. The field has evolved rapidly in recent years from traditional multi-arm bandit and collaborative filtering techniques, with new methods employing Deep Learning models to capture non-linearities. Despite progress, the dynamic nature of online recommendations still poses great challenges, such as finding the delicate balance between exploration and… Show more

Building robust online content recommendation systems requires learning complex interactions between user preferences and content features. The field has evolved rapidly in recent years from traditional multi-arm bandit and collaborative filtering techniques, with new methods employing Deep Learning models to capture non-linearities. Despite progress, the dynamic nature of online recommendations still poses great challenges, such as finding the delicate balance between exploration and exploitation. In this paper we show how uncertainty estimations can be incorporated by employing them in an optimistic exploitation/exploration strategy for more efficient exploration of new recommendations. We provide a novel hybrid deep neural network model, Deep Density Networks (DDN), which integrates content-based deep learning models with a collaborative scheme that is able to robustly model and estimate uncertainty. Finally, we present online and offline results after incorporating DNN into a real world content recommendation system that serves billions of recommendations per day, and show the benefit of using DDN in practice. Show less

System bottlenecks, namely those resources which are subjected to high contention, constrain system performance. Hence effective resource management should be done by focusing on the bottleneck resources and allocating them to the most deserving clients. It has been shown that for any combination of entitlements and requests a fair allocation of bottleneck resources can be found, using an off-line algorithm that is given full information in advance regarding the needs of each client. We extend… Show more

System bottlenecks, namely those resources which are subjected to high contention, constrain system performance. Hence effective resource management should be done by focusing on the bottleneck resources and allocating them to the most deserving clients. It has been shown that for any combination of entitlements and requests a fair allocation of bottleneck resources can be found, using an off-line algorithm that is given full information in advance regarding the needs of each client. We extend this result to the on-line case with no prior information. To this end we introduce a simple greedy algorithm. In essence, when a scheduling decision needs to be made, this algorithm selects the client that has the largest minimal gap between its entitlement and its current allocation among all the bottleneck resources. Importantly, this algorithm takes a global view of the system, and assigns each client a single priority based on his usage of all the resources; this single priority is then used to make coordinated scheduling decisions on all the resources. Extensive simulations show that this algorithm achieves fair allocations according to the desired entitlements for a wide range of conditions, without using any prior information regarding resource requirements. It also follows shifting usage patterns, including situations where the bottlenecks change with time. Show less