Recommender Systems

Workshop Papers

Venue Title
ICLR 2024 1. Building Sustainable Futures: Tutorial on Carbon Footprint Analysis and Mitigation Strategies Using Counter Factual Queries (Tutorials Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: As the sense of urgency regarding climate change continues to mount with growing regulatory pressure across the globe, it has become increasingly crucial for enterprises and governments to align their goals with sustainability values. They face a crucial imperative to act on climate change mitigation by disclosing their GHG emissions and committing to reduction and optimization of emissions from their industrial activities including operations, infrastructure, logistics, and supply chains. The world's largest enterprises have set long-term net-zero targets but lacks an integrated view of how their key business operations and processes contribute to their sustainability journey, which makes it difficult for them to embark on a well-planned journey to achieve their sustainability goals. With the recent advancement, AI intervention becomes imperative to measure, track, and improve ESG performance to achieve sustainability goals. This tutorial aims to provide a comprehensive guide on leveraging advanced AI techniques for analysing and mitigating carbon footprints in various sectors. The tutorial covers the utilization of a generalized framework that integrates sector-specific and cross-sector enterprise data, including assets and operations, to derive actionable insights. The framework also uses additional data such as weather parameters and contextual information to facilitate a holistic approach to carbon footprint analysis and its mitigation strategies. The tutorial will delve into the working of a framework which comprises of an LLM driven carbon accounting engine, predictive models for carbon emissions, anomaly detection models, and counterfactual models. It identifies the emission hotspots, thereafter provides actionable recommendations to mitigate the carbon emission. The proposed tutorial aims to empower participants with the knowledge and skills to make informed decisions towards building a more sustainable future

Authors: Kumar Saurav (IBM); Manikandan Padmanaban (IBM Research India); Ayush Jain (IBM Research); Jagabondhu Hazra (IBM Research India)
NeurIPS 2023 Towards Recommendations for Value Sensitive Sustainable Consumption (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Excessive consumption can strain natural resources, harm the environment, and widen societal gaps. While adopting a more sustainable lifestyle means making significant changes and potentially compromising personal desires, balancing sustainability with personal values poses a complex challenge. This article delves into designing recommender systems using neural networks and genetic algorithms, aiming to assist consumers in shopping sustainably without disregarding their individual preferences. We approach the search for good recommendations as a problem involving multiple objectives, representing diverse sustainability goals and personal values. While using a synthetic historical dataset based on real-world sources, our evaluations reveal substantial environmental benefits without demanding drastic personal sacrifices, even if consumers accept only a fraction of the recommendations.

Authors: Thomas Asikis (University of Zurich)
ICLR 2023 Activity-Based Recommendations for the Reduction of CO2 Emissions in Private Households (Papers Track)
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Abstract: This paper proposes an activity prediction framework for a multi-agent recommendation system to tackle the energy-efficiency problem in residential buildings. Our system generates an activity-shifting schedule based on the social practices from the users’ domestic life. We further provide a utility option for the recommender system to focus on saving CO2 emissions or energy costs, or both. The empirical results show that while focusing on the reduction of CO2 emissions, the system provides an average of 12% of emission savings and 7% of electricity cost savings. When concentrating on energy costs, 6% of emission savings and 20% of electricity cost savings are possible for the studied households.

Authors: Alona Zharova (Humboldt University of Berlin); Laura Löschmann (Humboldt University of Berlin)
NeurIPS 2022 Explainable Multi-Agent Recommendation System for Energy-Efficient Decision Support in Smart Homes (Papers Track)
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Abstract: Transparent, understandable, and persuasive recommendations support the electricity consumers’ behavioral change to tackle the energy efficiency problem. This paper proposes an explainable multi-agent recommendation system for load shifting for household appliances. First, we extend a novel multi-agent approach by designing an Explainability Agent that provides explainable recommendations for optimal appliance scheduling in a textual and visual manner. Second, we enhance the predictive capacity of other agents by including weather data and applying state-of-the-art models (i.e., k-nearest-neighbours, extreme gradient boosting, adaptive boosting, random forest, logistic regression, and explainable boosting machines). Since we want to help the user understand a single recommendation, we focus on local explainability approaches. In particular, we apply post-model approaches LIME (local, interpretable, model-agnostic explanation) and SHAP (Shapley additive explanations) as model-agnostic tools that can explain the predictions of the chosen classifiers. We further provide an overview of the predictive and explainability performance. Our results show a substantial improvement in the performance of the multi-agent system while at the same time opening up the “black box” of recommendations. To show the pathway to positive impact regarding climate change, we provide a discussion on the potential impact of the suggested approach.

Authors: Alona Zharova (Humboldt University of Berlin); Annika Boer (Humboldt University of Berlin); Julia Knoblauch (Humboldt University of Berlin); Kai Ingo Schewina (Humboldt University of Berlin); Jana Vihs (Humboldt University of Berlin)
NeurIPS 2021 Capturing Electricity Market Dynamics in the Optimal Trading of Strategic Agents using Neural Network Constrained Optimization (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: In competitive electricity markets the optimal trading problem of an electricity market agent is commonly formulated as a bi-level program, and solved as mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC). In this paper, an alternative paradigm, labeled as mathematical program with neural network constraint (MPNNC), is developed to incorporate complex market dynamics in the optimal bidding strategy. This method uses input-convex neural networks (ICNNs) to represent the mapping between the upper-level (agent) decisions and the lower-level (market) outcomes, i.e., to replace the lower-level problem by a neural network. In a comparative analysis, the optimal bidding problem of a load agent is formulated via the proposed MPNNC and via the classical bi-level programming method, and compared against each other.

Authors: Mihály Dolányi (KU Leuven); Kenneth Bruninx (KU Leuven); Jean-François Toubeau (Faculté Polytechnique (FPMs), Université de Mons (UMONS)); Erik Delaue (KU Leuven)