Mingzhi Mao


2025

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HyperCRS: Hypergraph-Aware Multi-Grained Preference Learning to Burst Filter Bubbles in Conversational Recommendation System
Yongsen Zheng | Mingjie Qian | Guohua Wang | Yang Liu | Ziliang Chen | Mingzhi Mao | Liang Lin | Kwok-Yan Lam
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

The filter bubble is a notorious issue in Recommender Systems (RSs), characterized by users being confined to a limited corpus of information or content that strengthens and amplifies their pre-established preferences and beliefs. Most existing methods primarily aim to analyze filter bubbles in the relatively static recommendation environment. Nevertheless, the filter bubble phenomenon continues to exacerbate as users interact with the system over time. To address these issues, we propose a novel paradigm, Hypergraph-Aware Multi-Grained Preference Learning to Burst Filter Bubbles in Conversational Recommendation System (HyperCRS), aiming to burst filter bubbles by learning multi-grained user preferences during the dynamic user-system interactions via natural language conversations. HyperCRS develops Multi-Grained Hypergraph (user-, item-, and attribute-grained) to explore diverse relations and capture high-order connectivity. It employs Hypergraph-Empowered Policy Learning, which includes Multi-Grained Preference Modeling to model user preferences and Preference-based Decision Making to disrupt filter bubbles during user interactions. Extensive results on four publicly CRS-based datasets show that HyperCRS achieves new state-of-the-art performance, and the superior of bursting filter bubbles in the CRS.

2019

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Incorporating Graph Attention Mechanism into Knowledge Graph Reasoning Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning
Heng Wang | Shuangyin Li | Rong Pan | Mingzhi Mao
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Knowledge Graph (KG) reasoning aims at finding reasoning paths for relations, in order to solve the problem of incompleteness in KG. Many previous path-based methods like PRA and DeepPath suffer from lacking memory components, or stuck in training. Therefore, their performances always rely on well-pretraining. In this paper, we present a deep reinforcement learning based model named by AttnPath, which incorporates LSTM and Graph Attention Mechanism as the memory components. We define two metrics, Mean Selection Rate (MSR) and Mean Replacement Rate (MRR), to quantitatively measure how difficult it is to learn the query relations, and take advantages of them to fine-tune the model under the framework of reinforcement learning. Meanwhile, a novel mechanism of reinforcement learning is proposed by forcing an agent to walk forward every step to avoid the agent stalling at the same entity node constantly. Based on this operation, the proposed model not only can get rid of the pretraining process, but also achieves state-of-the-art performance comparing with the other models. We test our model on FB15K-237 and NELL-995 datasets with different tasks. Extensive experiments show that our model is effective and competitive with many current state-of-the-art methods, and also performs well in practice.