We explore predicting eCommerce user preferences for product aspects such as brand, size, and color - a task we define as Aspect Affinity. Solving this task improves customer understanding and enables fine-grained personalization in recommendation, search, and marketing. We frame Aspect Affinity as a temporal prediction task: forecasting a users future aspect choices from their time-ordered interaction history, capturing long-term preferences that evolve beyond the current session. To this end, we propose DeepAffinity, which leverages Small Language Models (SLMs) with structured prompts and specialized prediction heads fine-tuned for this task. We show DeepAffinity outperforms standard generative fine-tuning methods, while general-purpose open-source LLMs perform poorly without task-specific tuning, highlighting their limits in modeling nuanced behavior. Finally, DeepAffinity enhances recommendation quality on a large-scale multinational eCommerce platform.
The results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.
Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· Information and Software Tec...· 394 citations· ⚡54
The possibility of inferring high-dimensional data inference in a model that consists of a prior and an auxiliary differentiable constraint given some additional information is considered, thereby allowing a range of potential applications in adapting models to new domains and tasks.
Alexandros Graikos, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, N. Jojic et al.· Neural Information Processin...· 316 citations· ⚡15
It is proved that any global minimizer of the trajectory balance objective can define a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution, and empirically demonstrate the benefits of the trajectories balance objective for GFlowNet convergence, diversity of generated samples, and robustness to long action sequences and large action spaces.
Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Moksh Jain, Emmanuel Bengio et al.· Neural Information Processin...· 302 citations· ⚡60
GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of such models.
Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al.· arXiv.org· 216 citations· ⚡17
The results are packaged in the Greenfield Startup Model (GSM), which explains the priority of startups to release the product as quickly as possible, and the need to shorten time-to-market, by speeding up the development through low-precision engineering activities.
Carmine Giardino, Nicolò Paternoster, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· IEEE Transactions on Softwar...· 178 citations· ⚡14
This state-of-practice investigation was performed using a literature review followed by a multiple-case study approach and presents how inconsistency between managerial strategies and execution can lead to failure by means of a behavioral framework.
Carmine Giardino, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson· International Conference on...· 175 citations· ⚡19
Adaptive AI agents can help make BIM data more machine-readable by navigating IFC models, interpreting inconsistent information, and mapping it to defined standards. In this blog, Alok Rawat shares findings from a real-world pilot in construction workflows. The post Adaptive AI Agents in Construction Workflows appeared first on GPT-Lab.