The last decade has brought with it a wave of innovative technology, shifting the channels through which creative content is created, consumed, and categorized. And, as our interactions with creative multimedia content shift towards online platforms, the sheer quantity of content on these platforms has necessitated the integration of algorithmic guidance in the discovery of these spaces. In this way, the recommendation algorithms that guide users' interactions with various art forms have been cast into the role of gatekeepers and begun to play an increasingly influential role in shaping the creation of artistic content. The work laid out in the following chapters fuses three major areas of research: graph representation learning, music information retrieval, and fairness as applied to the task of music recommendation. In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs), a powerful new architecture which enables deep learning approaches to be applied to graph or network structures, have proven incredibly influential in the music recommendation domain. In tandem with the striking performance gains that GNNs are able to achieve, many of these systems, have been shown to be strongly influenced by the degree, or number of outgoing edges, of individual nodes. More concretely, recent works have uncovered disparities in the qualities of representations learned by state of the art GNNs between nodes which are strongly and weakly connected. Translating these findings to the sphere of recommender systems, where nodes and edges are used to represent the interactions between users and various items, these disparities in representation that are contingent upon a node's connectivity can be seen as a form of popularity bias. And, indeed, within the broader recommendation community, popularity bias has long been considered an open problem, in which recommender systems begin to favor mainstream content over, potentially more relevant, but niche or novel items. If left unchecked these algorithmic nudged towards previously popular content can create, intensify, and enforce negative cycles that perpetuate disparities in representation on both the user and the creator ends of the content consumption pipeline. Particularly in the recommendation of creative (e.g. musical) content, the downstream effects in these disparities of visibility can have genuine economic consequences for artists from under-represented communities. Thus, the problem of popularity bias is something that must be addressed from both a technical and societal perspective. And, as the influence of recommender systems continues to spread, the effects of this phenomenon only become more spurious, as they begin to have critical downstream effects that shape the larger ecosystems in which art is created. Thus, the broad focus of thesis is the mitigation of popularity bias in music recommendation. In order to tailor our exploration of this issue to the graph domain, we begin by formalizing the relationship between degree fairness and popularity bias. In doing so, we concretely define the notion of popularity, grounding it in the structural principles of an interaction network, and enabling us to design objectives that can mitigate the effects of popularity on representation learning. In our first work, we focus on understanding the effects of sampling on degree fairness in uni-partite graphs. The purpose of this work is to lay the foundation for the graph neural network model which will underlie our music recommender system. We then build off this first work by extending the initial fairness framework to be compatible with bi-partite graphs and applying it to the music domain. The motivation of this work is rooted in the notion of discovery, or the idea that users engage with algorithmic curation in order to find content that is both novel and relevant to their artistic tastes. We present the intrinsic relationship between discovery objectives and the presence of popularity bias, explaining that the presence of popularity bias can blind a system to the musical qualities that underpin the underlying needs of music listening. As we will explain in later sections, one of the key elements of this work is our ability to ground our fairness notion in the musical domain. Thus, we propose a domain-aware, individual fairness-based approach which addresses popularity bias in graph neural network (GNNs) based recommender systems. In order to facilitate this domain awareness, we perform extensive dataset augmentation, taking two state of the art music recommendation datasets and augmenting them with rich multi-modal node-level features. Finally, we ground our evaluation in the cold start setting, showing the importance of inductive methodologies in the music space. / La dernière décennie a apporté avec elle une vague de technologies innovantes, modifiant la manière dont le contenu créatif est créé, consommé et catégorisé. Et, à mesure que nos interactions avec les contenus multimédias créatifs se déplacent vers les plateformes en ligne, la quantité de contenu sur ces plateformes a nécessité l’intégration d’un guidage algorithmique dans la découverte de ces espaces. De cette façon, les algorithmes de recommandation qui guident les interactions des utilisateurs avec diverses formes d’art ont été jetés dans le rôle de gardiens et ont commencé à jouer un rôle de plus en plus influent dans l’élaboration de la création de contenu artistique. Le travail présenté dans les chapitres suivants fusionne trois grands domaines de recherche : l’apprentissage de la représentation graphique, la recherche d’informations musicales et l’équité appliquée à la tâche de recommandation musicale. Alors que l’influence des systèmes de recommandation continue de s’étendre et de s’intensifier, il est crucial de prendre en compte les effets en aval que les choix de conception peuvent avoir sur l’écosystème plus large de la création artistique. Ces dernières années, l’intégration des réseaux sociaux dans la tâche de recommandation musicale a donné naissance aux réseaux neuronaux de graphes (GNN), une nouvelle architecture capable de faire des prédictions sur les structures de graphes. Parallèlement aux gains miraculeux que les GNN sont capables de réaliser, bon nombre de ces systèmes peuvent également être la proie de biais de popularité, les forçant à privilégier le contenu grand public par rapport à des éléments potentiellement plus pertinents, mais de niche ou nouveaux. S’il n’est pas maîtrisé, ce cycle négatif peut perpétuer les disparités de représentation entre la musique d’artistes, de genres ou de populations minoritaires. Et, ce faisant, les disparités dans la visibilité des éléments peuvent entraîner des problèmes à la fois du point de vue des performances et de la société. L’objectif de la thèse est l’atténuation du biais de popularité. Premièrement, le travail formalise les liens entre l’équité individuelle et la présence d’un biais de popularité parmi les contenus créatifs. Ensuite, nous étendons un cadre d’équité individuelle, en l’appliquant au domaine de la recommandation musicale. Le coeur de cette thèse s’articule autour de la proposition d’une approche basée sur l’équité individuelle et sensible au domaine qui traite le biais de popularité dans les systèmes de recommandation basés sur les réseaux de 5 neurones graphiques (GNN). L’un des éléments clés de ce travail est notre capacité à ancrer notre notion d’équité dans le domaine musical. Afin de faciliter cette prise de conscience du domaine, nous effectuons une augmentation étendue des ensembles de données, en prenant deux ensembles de données de recommandation musicale à la pointe de la technologie et en les augmentant avec de riches fonctionnalités multimodales au niveau des noeuds. Enfin, nous fondons notre évaluation sur le démarrage à froid, montrant l’importance des méthodologies inductives dans l’espace musical.

Representation Learning is ubiquitous in state-of-the-art machine learning workflow, including data exploration/visualization, data preprocessing, data model learning, and model interpretations. However, the majority of the newly proposed Representation Learning methods are more suitable for problems with a large amount of data. Applying these methods to problems with a limited amount of data may lead to unsatisfactory performance. Therefore, there is a need for developing Representation Learning methods which are tailored for problems with ``small data", such as, clinical and biomedical data analytics. In this dissertation, we describe our studies of tackling the challenging clinical and biomedical data analytics problem from four perspectives: data preprocessing, temporal data representation learning, output representation learning, and joint input-output representation learning. Data scaling is an important component in data preprocessing. The objective in data scaling is to scale/transform the raw features into reasonable ranges such that each feature of an instance will be equally exploited by the machine learning model. For example, in a credit flaw detection task, a machine learning model may utilize a person's credit score and annual income as features, but because the ranges of these two features are different, a machine learning model may consider one more heavily than another. In this dissertation, I thoroughly introduce the problem in data scaling and describe an approach for data scaling which can intrinsically handle the outlier problem and lead to better model prediction performance. Learning new representations for data in the unstandardized form is a common task in data analytics and data science applications. Usually, data come in a tubular form, namely, the data is represented by a table in which each row is a feature (row) vector of an instance. However, it is also common that the data are not in this form; for example, texts, images, and video/audio records. In this dissertation, I describe the challenge of analyzing imperfect multivariate time series data in healthcare and biomedical research and show that the proposed method can learn a powerful representation to encounter various imperfections and lead to an improvement of prediction performance. Learning output representations is a new aspect of Representation Learning, and its applications have shown promising results in complex tasks, including computer vision and recommendation systems. The main objective of an output representation algorithm is to explore the relationship among the target variables, such that a prediction model can efficiently exploit the similarities and potentially improve prediction performance. In this dissertation, I describe a learning framework which incorporates output representation learning to time-to-event estimation. Particularly, the approach learns the model parameters and time vectors simultaneously. Experimental results do not only show the effectiveness of this approach but also show the interpretability of this approach from the visualizations of the time vectors in 2-D space. Learning the input (feature) representation, output representation, and predictive modeling are closely related to each other. Therefore, it is a very natural extension of the state-of-the-art by considering them together in a joint framework. In this dissertation, I describe a large-margin ranking-based learning framework for time-to-event estimation with joint input embedding learning, output embedding learning, and model parameter learning. In the framework, I cast the functional learning problem to a kernel learning problem, and by adopting the theories in Multiple Kernel Learning, I propose an efficient optimization algorithm. Empirical results also show its effectiveness on several benchmark datasets. / Computer and Information Science

Knowledge graphs (KGs) store relational information in a flexible triplet schema and have become ubiquitous for information storage in domains such as web search, e-commerce, social networks, and biology. Retrieval of information from KGs is generally achieved through logical reasoning, but this process can be computationally expensive and has limited performance due to the large size and complexity of relationships within the KGs. Furthermore, to extend the usage of KGs to non-expert users, retrieval over them cannot solely rely on logical reasoning but also needs to consider text-based search. This creates a need for multi-modal representations that capture both the semantic and structural features from the KGs. The primary objective of the proposed work is to extend the accessibility of KGs to non-expert users/institutions by enabling them to utilize non-technical textual queries to search over the vast amount of information stored in KGs. To achieve this objective, the research aims to solve four limitations: (i) develop a framework for logical reasoning over KGs that can learn representations to capture hierarchical dependencies between entities, (ii) design an architecture that can effectively learn the logic flow of queries from natural language text, (iii) create a multi-modal architecture that can capture inherent semantic and structural features from the entities and KGs, respectively, and (iv) introduce a novel hyperbolic learning framework to enable the scalability of hyperbolic neural networks over large graphs using meta-learning. The proposed work is distinct from current research because it models the logical flow of textual queries in hyperbolic space and uses it to perform complex reasoning over large KGs. The models developed in this work are evaluated on both the standard research setting of logical reasoning, as well as, real-world scenarios of query matching and search, specifically, in the e-commerce domain. In summary, the proposed work aims to extend the accessibility of KGs to non-expert users by enabling them to use non-technical textual queries to search vast amounts of information stored in KGs. To achieve this objective, the work proposes the use of multi-modal representations that capture both semantic and structural features from the KGs, and a novel hyperbolic learning framework to enable scalability of hyperbolic neural networks over large graphs. The work also models the logical flow of textual queries in hyperbolic space to perform complex reasoning over large KGs. The models developed in this work are evaluated on both the standard research setting of logical reasoning and real-world scenarios in the e-commerce domain. / Doctor of Philosophy / Knowledge graphs (KGs) are databases that store information in a way that allows computers to easily identify relationships between different pieces of data. They are widely used in domains such as web search, e-commerce, social networks, and biology. However, retrieving information from KGs can be computationally expensive, and relying solely on logical reasoning can limit their accessibility to non-expert users. This is where the proposed work comes in. The primary objective is to make KGs more accessible to non-experts by enabling them to use natural language queries to search the vast amounts of information stored in KGs. To achieve this objective, the research aims to address four limitations. Firstly, a framework for logical reasoning over KGs that can learn representations to capture hierarchical dependencies between entities is developed. Secondly, an architecture is designed that can effectively learn the logic flow of queries from natural language text. Thirdly, a multi-modal architecture is created that can capture inherent semantic and structural features from the entities and KGs, respectively. Finally, a novel hyperbolic learning framework is introduced to enable the scalability of hyperbolic neural networks over large graphs using meta-learning. The proposed work is unique because it models the logical flow of textual queries in hyperbolic space and uses it to perform complex reasoning over large KGs. The models developed in this work are evaluated on both the standard research setting of logical reasoning, as well as, real-world scenarios of query matching and search, specifically, in the e-commerce domain. In summary, the proposed work aims to make KGs more accessible to non-experts by enabling them to use natural language queries to search vast amounts of information stored in KGs. To achieve this objective, the work proposes the use of multi-modal representations that capture both semantic and structural features from the KGs, and a novel hyperbolic learning framework to enable scalability of hyperbolic neural networks over large graphs. The work also models the logical flow of textual queries in hyperbolic space to perform complex reasoning over large KGs. The results of this work have significant implications for the field of information retrieval, as it provides a more efficient and accessible way to retrieve information from KGs. Additionally, the multi-modal approach taken in this work has potential applications in other areas of machine learning, such as image recognition and natural language processing. The work also contributes to the development of hyperbolic geometry as a tool for modeling complex networks, which has implications for fields such as network science and social network analysis. Overall, this work represents an important step towards making the vast amounts of information stored in KGs more accessible and useful to a wider audience.

<p>Research on graph representation learning (GRL) has made major strides over the past decade, with widespread applications in domains such as e-commerce, personalization, fraud & abuse, life sciences, and social network analysis. Despite its widespread success, fundamental questions on practices employed in modern day GRL have remained unanswered. Unraveling and advancing two such fundamental questions on the practices in modern day GRL forms the overarching theme of my thesis.</p> <p>The first part of my thesis deals with the mathematical foundations of GRL. GRL is used to solve tasks such as node classification, link prediction, clustering, graph classification, and so on, albeit with seemingly different frameworks (e.g. Graph neural networks for node/graph classification, (implicit) matrix factorization for link prediction/ clustering, etc.). The existence of very distinct frameworks for different graph tasks has puzzled researchers and practitioners alike. In my thesis, using group theory, I provide a theoretical blueprint that connects these seemingly different frameworks, bridging methods like matrix factorization and graph neural networks. With this renewed understanding, I then provide guidelines to better realize the full capabilities of these methods in a multitude of tasks.</p> <p>The second part of my thesis deals with cases where modeling real-world objects as a graph is an oversimplified description of the underlying data. Specifically, I look at two such objects (i) modeling hypergraphs (where edges encompass two or more vertices) and (ii) using GRL for predicting protein properties. Towards (i) hypergraphs, I develop a hypergraph neural network which takes advantage of the inherent sparsity of real world hypergraphs, without unduly sacrificing on its ability to distinguish non isomorphic hypergraphs. The designed hypergraph neural network is then leveraged to learn expressive representations of hyperedges for two tasks, namely hyperedge classification and hyperedge expansion. Experiments show that using our network results in improved performance over the current approach of converting the hypergraph into a dyadic graph and using (dyadic) GRL frameworks. Towards (ii) proteins, I introduce the concept of conditional invariances and leverage it to model the inherent flexibility present in proteins. Using conditional invariances, I provide a new framework for GRL which can capture protein-dependent conformations and ensures that all viable conformers of a protein obtain the same representation. Experiments show that endowing existing GRL models with my framework shows noticeable improvements on multiple different protein datasets and tasks.</p>

Cette thèse aborde le problème de la recherche d'images à grande échelle. Pour aborder la recherche d'images à grande échelle, il est nécessaire de coder des images avec des représentations compactes qui peuvent être efficacement utilisées pour comparer des images de manière significative. L'obtention d'une telle représentation compacte peut se faire soit en comprimant des représentations efficaces de grande dimension, soit en apprenant des représentations compactes de bout en bout. Le travail de cette thèse explore et avance dans ces deux directions. Dans notre première contribution, nous étendons les approches de quantification vectorielle structurée telles que la quantification de produit en proposant une représentation somme pondérée de codewords. Nous testons et vérifions les avantages de notre approche pour la recherche approximative du plus proche voisin sur les caractéristiques d'image locales et globales, ce qui est un moyen important d'aborder la recherche d'images à grande échelle. L'apprentissage de la représentation compacte pour la recherche d'images a récemment attiré beaucoup d'attention avec diverses approches basées sur le hachage profond proposées. Dans de telles approches, les réseaux de neurones convolutifs profonds apprennent à coder des images en codes binaires compacts. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une approche d'apprentissage supervisé profond pour la représentation binaire structurée qui rappelle une approche de quantification vectorielle structurée telle que PQ. Notre approche bénéficie de la recherche asymétrique par rapport aux approches de hachage profond et apporte une nette amélioration de la précision de la recherche au même débit binaire. L'index inversé est une autre partie importante du système de recherche à grande échelle en dehors de la représentation compacte. À cette fin, nous étendons nos idées pour l'apprentissage de la représentation compacte supervisée pour la construction d'index inversés. Dans ce travail, nous abordons l'indexation inversée avec un apprentissage approfondi supervisé et essayons d'unifier l'apprentissage de l'indice inversé et de la représentation compacte. Nous évaluons minutieusement toutes les méthodes proposées sur divers ensembles de données accessibles au public. Nos méthodes surpassent ou sont compétitives avec l'état de l'art. / This thesis addresses the problem of large-scale image search. To tackle image search at large scale, it is required to encode images with compact representations which can be efficiently employed to compare images meaningfully. Obtaining such compact representation can be done either by compressing effective high dimensional representations or by learning compact representations in an end-to-end manner. The work in this thesis explores and advances in both of these directions. In our first contribution, we extend structured vector quantization approaches such as Product Quantization by proposing a weighted codeword sum representation. We test and verify the benefits of our approach for approximate nearest neighbor search on local and global image features which is an important way to approach large scale image search. Learning compact representation for image search recently got a lot of attention with various deep hashing based approaches being proposed. In such approaches, deep convolutional neural networks are learned to encode images into compact binary codes. In this thesis we propose a deep supervised learning approach for structured binary representation which is a reminiscent of structured vector quantization approaches such as PQ. Our approach benefits from asymmetric search over deep hashing approaches and gives a clear improvement for search accuracy at the same bit-rate. Inverted index is another important part of large scale search system apart from the compact representation. To this end, we extend our ideas for supervised compact representation learning for building inverted indexes. In this work we approach inverted indexing with supervised deep learning and make an attempt to unify the learning of inverted index and compact representation. We thoroughly evaluate all the proposed methods on various publicly available datasets. Our methods either outperform, or are competitive with the state-of-the-art.

Différentes disciplines des sciences humaines telles la philologie ou la paléographie font face à des tâches complexes et fastidieuses pour l'examen des sources de données. La proposition d'approches computationnelles en humanités permet d'adresser les problématiques rencontrées telles que la lecture, l'analyse et l'archivage de façon systématique. Les modèles conceptuels élaborés reposent sur des algorithmes et ces derniers donnent lieu à des implémentations informatiques qui automatisent ces tâches fastidieuses. La première partie de la thèse vise, d'une part, à établir la structuration thématique d'un corpus, en construisant des espaces sémantiques de grande dimension. D'autre part, elle vise au suivi dynamique des thématiques qui constitue un réel défi scientifique, notamment en raison du passage à l'échelle. La seconde partie de la thèse traite de manière holistique la page d'un document numérisé sans aucune intervention préalable. Le but est d'apprendre automatiquement des représentations du trait de l'écriture ou du tracé d'un certain script par rapport au tracé d'un autre script. Il faut dans ce cadre tenir compte de l'environnement où se trouve le tracé : image, artefact, bruits dus à la détérioration de la qualité du papier, etc. Notre approche propose un empilement de réseaux de neurones auto-encodeurs afin de fournir une représentation alternative des données reçues en entrée. / Different disciplines in the humanities, such as philology or palaeography, face complex and time-consuming tasks whenever it comes to examining the data sources. The introduction of computational approaches in humanities makes it possible to address issues such as semantic analysis and systematic archiving. The conceptual models developed are based on algorithms that are later hard coded in order to automate these tedious tasks. In the first part of the thesis we propose a novel method to build a semantic space based on topics modeling. In the second part and in order to classify historical documents according to their script. We propose a novel representation learning method based on stacking convolutional auto-encoder. The goal is to automatically learn plot representations of the script or the written language.

Des avancées significatives sur les réseaux de neurones profonds ont récemment permis le développement de technologies importantes comme les voitures autonomes et les assistants personnels intelligents basés sur la commande vocale. La plupart des succès en apprentissage profond concernent la prédiction, alors que les percées initiales viennent des modèles génératifs. Actuellement, même s'il existe des outils puissants dans la littérature des modèles génératifs basés sur les réseaux profonds, ces techniques sont essentiellement utilisées pour la prédiction ou pour générer des objets connus (i.e., des images de haute qualité qui appartiennent à des classes connues) : un objet généré qui est à priori inconnu est considéré comme une erreur (Salimans et al., 2016) ou comme un objet fallacieux (Bengio et al., 2013b). En d'autres termes, quand la prédiction est considérée comme le seul objectif possible, la nouveauté est vue comme une erreur - que les chercheurs ont essayé d'éliminer au maximum. Cette thèse défends le point de vue que, plutôt que d'éliminer ces nouveautés, on devrait les étudier et étudier le potentiel génératif des réseaux neuronaux pour créer de la nouveauté utile - particulièrement sachant l'importance économique et sociétale de la création d'objets nouveaux dans les sociétés contemporaines. Cette thèse a pour objectif d'étudier la génération de la nouveauté et sa relation avec les modèles de connaissance produits par les réseaux neurones profonds génératifs. Notre première contribution est la démonstration de l'importance des représentations et leur impact sur le type de nouveautés qui peuvent être générées : une conséquence clé est qu'un agent créatif a besoin de re-représenter les objets connus et utiliser cette représentation pour générer des objets nouveaux. Ensuite, on démontre que les fonctions objectives traditionnelles utilisées dans la théorie de l'apprentissage statistique, comme le maximum de vraisemblance, ne sont pas nécessairement les plus adaptées pour étudier la génération de nouveauté. On propose plusieurs alternatives à un niveau conceptuel. Un deuxième résultat clé est la confirmation que les modèles actuels - qui utilisent les fonctions objectives traditionnelles - peuvent en effet générer des objets inconnus. Cela montre que même si les fonctions objectives comme le maximum de vraisemblance s'efforcent à éliminer la nouveauté, les implémentations en pratique échouent à le faire. A travers une série d'expérimentations, on étudie le comportement de ces modèles ainsi que les objets qu'ils génèrent. En particulier, on propose une nouvelle tâche et des métriques pour la sélection de bons modèles génératifs pour la génération de la nouveauté. Finalement, la thèse conclue avec une série d'expérimentations qui clarifie les caractéristiques des modèles qui génèrent de la nouveauté. Les expériences montrent que la sparsité, le niveaux du niveau de corruption et la restriction de la capacité des modèles tuent la nouveauté et que les modèles qui arrivent à reconnaître des objets nouveaux arrivent généralement aussi à générer de la nouveauté. / In recent years, significant advances made in deep neural networks enabled the creation of groundbreaking technologies such as self-driving cars and voice-enabled personal assistants. Almost all successes of deep neural networks are about prediction, whereas the initial breakthroughs came from generative models. Today, although we have very powerful deep generative modeling techniques, these techniques are essentially being used for prediction or for generating known objects (i.e., good quality images of known classes): any generated object that is a priori unknown is considered as a failure mode (Salimans et al., 2016) or as spurious (Bengio et al., 2013b). In other words, when prediction seems to be the only possible objective, novelty is seen as an error that researchers have been trying hard to eliminate. This thesis defends the point of view that, instead of trying to eliminate these novelties, we should study them and the generative potential of deep nets to create useful novelty, especially given the economic and societal importance of creating new objects in contemporary societies. The thesis sets out to study novelty generation in relationship with data-driven knowledge models produced by deep generative neural networks. Our first key contribution is the clarification of the importance of representations and their impact on the kind of novelties that can be generated: a key consequence is that a creative agent might need to rerepresent known objects to access various kinds of novelty. We then demonstrate that traditional objective functions of statistical learning theory, such as maximum likelihood, are not necessarily the best theoretical framework for studying novelty generation. We propose several other alternatives at the conceptual level. A second key result is the confirmation that current models, with traditional objective functions, can indeed generate unknown objects. This also shows that even though objectives like maximum likelihood are designed to eliminate novelty, practical implementations do generate novelty. Through a series of experiments, we study the behavior of these models and the novelty they generate. In particular, we propose a new task setup and metrics for selecting good generative models. Finally, the thesis concludes with a series of experiments clarifying the characteristics of models that can exhibit novelty. Experiments show that sparsity, noise level, and restricting the capacity of the net eliminates novelty and that models that are better at recognizing novelty are also good at generating novelty.

<div>Representation learning (RL) for social networks facilitates real-world tasks such as visualization, link prediction and friend recommendation. Many methods have been proposed in this area to learn continuous low-dimensional embedding of nodes, edges or relations in social and information networks. However, most previous network RL methods neglect social signals, such as textual communication between users (nodes). Unlike more typical binary features on edges, such as post likes and retweet actions, social signals are more varied and contain ambiguous information. This makes it more challenging to incorporate them into RL methods, but the ability to quantify social signals should allow RL methods to better capture the implicit relationships among real people in social networks. Second, most previous work in network RL has focused on learning from homogeneous networks (i.e., single type of node, edge, role, and direction) and thus, most existing RL methods cannot capture the heterogeneous nature of relationships in social networks. Based on these identified gaps, this thesis aims to study the feasibility of incorporating heterogeneous information, e.g., texts, attributes, multiple relations and edge types (directions), to learn more accurate, fine-grained network representations. </div><div> </div><div>In this dissertation, we discuss a preliminary study and outline three major works that aim to incorporate textual interactions to improve relational representation learning. The preliminary study learns a joint representation that captures the textual similarity in content between interacting nodes. The promising results motivate us to pursue broader research on using social signals for representation learning. The first major component aims to learn explicit node and relation embeddings in social networks. Traditional knowledge graph (KG) completion models learn latent representations of entities and relations by interpreting them as translations operating on the embedding of the entities. However, existing approaches do not consider textual communications between users, which contain valuable information to provide meaning and context for social relationships. We propose a novel approach that incorporates textual interactions between each pair of users to improve representation learning of both users and relationships. The second major component focuses on analyzing how users interact with each other via natural language content. Although the data is interconnected and dependent, previous research has primarily focused on modeling the social network behavior separately from the textual content. In this work, we model the data in a holistic way, taking into account the connections between the social behavior of users and the content generated when they interact, by learning a joint embedding over user characteristics and user language. In the third major component, we consider the task of learning edge representations in social networks. Edge representations are especially beneficial as we need to describe or explain the relationships, activities, and interactions among users. However, previous work in this area lack well-defined edge representations and ignore the relational signals over multiple views of social networks, which typically contain multi-view contexts (due to multiple edge types) that need to be considered when learning the representation. We propose a new methodology that captures asymmetry in multiple views by learning well-defined edge representations and incorporates textual communications to identify multiple sources of social signals that moderate the impact of different views between users.</div>

<p>In this work, we study a class of Markovian information theoretic optimization problems motivated by the recent interests in incorporating mutual information as performance metrics which gives evident success in representation learning, feature extraction and clustering problems. In particular, we focus on the information bottleneck (IB) and privacy funnel (PF) methods and their recent multi-view, multi-source generalizations that gain attention because the performance significantly improved with multi-view, multi-source data. Nonetheless, the generalized problems challenge existing IB and PF solves in terms of the complexity and their abilities to tackle large-scale data. </p> <p>To address this, we study both the IB and PF under a unified framework and propose solving it through splitting methods, including renowned algorithms such as alternating directional method of multiplier (ADMM), Peaceman-Rachford splitting (PRS) and Douglas-Rachford splitting (DRS) as special cases. Our convergence analysis and the locally linear rate of convergence results give rise to new splitting method based IB and PF solvers that can be easily generalized to multi-view IB, multi-source PF. We implement the proposed methods with gradient descent and empirically evaluate the new solvers in both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our numerical results demonstrate improved performance over the state-of-the-art approach with significant reduction in complexity. Furthermore, we consider the practical scenario where there is distribution mismatch between training and testing data generating processes under a known bounded divergence constraint. In analyzing the generalization error, we develop new techniques inspired by the input-output mutual information approach and tighten the existing generalization error bounds.</p>

De nos jours, les médias sociaux ont largement affecté tous les aspects de la vie humaine. Le changement le plus significatif dans le comportement des gens après l'émergence des réseaux sociaux en ligne (OSNs) est leur méthode de communication et sa portée. Avoir plus de connexions sur les OSNs apporte plus d'attention et de visibilité aux gens, où cela s'appelle la popularité sur les médias sociaux. Selon le type de réseau social, la popularité se mesure par le nombre d'adeptes, d'amis, de retweets, de goûts et toutes les autres mesures qui servaient à calculer l'engagement. L'étude du comportement de popularité des utilisateurs et des contenus publiés sur les médias sociaux et la prédiction de leur statut futur sont des axes de recherche importants qui bénéficient à différentes applications telles que les systèmes de recommandation, les réseaux de diffusion de contenu, les campagnes publicitaires, la prévision des résultats des élections, etc. Cette thèse porte sur l'analyse du comportement de popularité des utilisateurs d'OSN et de leurs messages publiés afin, d'une part, d'identifier les tendances de popularité des utilisateurs et des messages et, d'autre part, de prévoir leur popularité future et leur niveau d'engagement pour les messages publiés par les utilisateurs. A cette fin, i) l'évolution de la popularité des utilisateurs de l'ONS est étudiée à l'aide d'un ensemble de données d'utilisateurs professionnels 8K Facebook collectées par un crawler avancé. L'ensemble de données collectées comprend environ 38 millions d'instantanés des valeurs de popularité des utilisateurs et 64 millions de messages publiés sur une période de 4 ans. Le regroupement des séquences temporelles des valeurs de popularité des utilisateurs a permis d'identifier des modèles d'évolution de popularité différents et intéressants. Les grappes identifiées sont caractérisées par l'analyse du secteur d'activité des utilisateurs, appelé catégorie, leur niveau d'activité, ainsi que l'effet des événements externes. Ensuite ii) la thèse porte sur la prédiction de l'engagement des utilisateurs sur les messages publiés par les utilisateurs sur les OSNs. Un nouveau modèle de prédiction est proposé qui tire parti de l'information mutuelle par points (PMI) et prédit la réaction future des utilisateurs aux messages nouvellement publiés. Enfin, iii) le modèle proposé est élargi pour tirer profit de l'apprentissage de la représentation et prévoir l'engagement futur des utilisateurs sur leurs postes respectifs. L'approche de prédiction proposée extrait l'intégration de l'utilisateur de son historique de réaction au lieu d'utiliser les méthodes conventionnelles d'extraction de caractéristiques. La performance du modèle proposé prouve qu'il surpasse les méthodes d'apprentissage conventionnelles disponibles dans la littérature. Les modèles proposés dans cette thèse, non seulement déplacent les modèles de prédiction de réaction vers le haut pour exploiter les fonctions d'apprentissage de la représentation au lieu de celles qui sont faites à la main, mais pourraient également aider les nouvelles agences, les campagnes publicitaires, les fournisseurs de contenu dans les CDN et les systèmes de recommandation à tirer parti de résultats de prédiction plus précis afin d'améliorer leurs services aux utilisateurs / Nowadays, social media has widely affected every aspect of human life. The most significant change in people's behavior after emerging Online Social Networks (OSNs) is their communication method and its range. Having more connections on OSNs brings more attention and visibility to people, where it is called popularity on social media. Depending on the type of social network, popularity is measured by the number of followers, friends, retweets, likes, and all those other metrics that is used to calculate engagement. Studying the popularity behavior of users and published contents on social media and predicting its future status are the important research directions which benefit different applications such as recommender systems, content delivery networks, advertising campaign, election results prediction and so on. This thesis addresses the analysis of popularity behavior of OSN users and their published posts in order to first, identify the popularity trends of users and posts and second, predict their future popularity and engagement level for published posts by users. To this end, i) the popularity evolution of ONS users is studied using a dataset of 8K Facebook professional users collected by an advanced crawler. The collected dataset includes around 38 million snapshots of users' popularity values and 64 million published posts over a period of 4 years. Clustering temporal sequences of users' popularity values led to identifying different and interesting popularity evolution patterns. The identified clusters are characterized by analyzing the users' business sector, called category, their activity level, and also the effect of external events. Then ii) the thesis focuses on the prediction of user engagement on the posts published by users on OSNs. A novel prediction model is proposed which takes advantage of Point-wise Mutual Information (PMI) and predicts users' future reaction to newly published posts. Finally, iii) the proposed model is extended to get benefits of representation learning and predict users' future engagement on each other's posts. The proposed prediction approach extracts user embedding from their reaction history instead of using conventional feature extraction methods. The performance of the proposed model proves that it outperforms conventional learning methods available in the literature. The models proposed in this thesis, not only improves the reaction prediction models to exploit representation learning features instead of hand-crafted features but also could help news agencies, advertising campaigns, content providers in CDNs, and recommender systems to take advantage of more accurate prediction results in order to improve their user services