Upstage Wins WSDM 2023 Best Paper Honorable Mention Award
3/7/2023Upstage won the Best Paper Award - Honorable Mention for its session-based recommendation technology research at the 16th ACM international WSDM conference
Upstage and Hong Kong research team's joint research was awarded as one of the top 0.5% of 690 submitted papers.
This achievement reaffirms the excellence of Upstage's recommendation technology proven in real-world services since 2021
(Seoul, Mar. 7, 2023 /Upstage) Upstage, Korea's leading AI startup, has received global recognition for its cutting-edge AI recommendation technology.
Upstage announced that it has been awarded the Best Paper Award - Honorable Mention at the 16th ACM International WSDM Conference, held in Singapore from February 27 to March 3.
WSDM is an annual conference organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) that is widely recognized as one of the world's most prestigious gatherings in the fields of web search and data mining. This year's conference received 690 submissions covering a wide range of topics, including recommendation systems, click-through rate prediction, and semantic search. Only 123 papers, or 17.8 percent, passed the rigorous screening process, making Upstage's recognition all the more impressive.
Upstage's award-winning paper, "Efficiently Leveraging Multi-level User Intent for Session-based Recommendation via Atten-Mixer Network," was the result of a collaborative research effort between the company's research team in Hong Kong. The paper explores session-based recommendation, a technique that predicts a user's next action based on recent behavior. It proposes a method to model user intent in multiple levels and improve recommendation performance through a new network structure called the Atten-Mixer (Multi-Level Attention Mixture Network).
One of the main challenges in developing effective recommendation systems is managing the exponential growth in model complexity that comes with incorporating various graph neural networks (GNNs). Upstage overcame this challenge by dissecting part of the neural networks and focusing on the most important elements, thus optimizing the search space and achieving optimal recommendations.
The team also considered both the features and relationships of the item to predict which item the user is likely to select, thereby improving the quality of recommendations.
For instance, if a user searches for a wedding dress and then looks for furniture to purchase, Upstage's proposed method can deduce that the user's intention is related to marriage and home decoration, and recommend relevant products accordingly, thus boosting the accuracy of recommendations.
Upstage's research was highly regarded by the WSDM program committee and participants, and was selected as a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award recipient. This award is given only to the top 0.5 percent of all submitted papers, and recognizes the outstanding research capabilities and achievements of the Upstage-Hong Kong research team.
The WSDM committee commended Upstage's research for proposing a fresh approach to session-based recommendation by exploring multi-level inference on user intent. They also praised the team's effectiveness in simplifying complex GNNs and designing more effective models to greatly reduce the search space in session-based recommendation, while demonstrating improved empirical performance through various online and offline experiments.
The proposed techniques developed by Upstage have already been launched on a large-scale e-commercial online service since 2021, and have led to significant improvements in top-tier business metrics, enhancing the performance of the company's RecSys AI Pack.
Upstage's AI Pack utilizes numerous models that have demonstrated their performance in various competitions such as the award-winning paper and Kaggle, and selects recommendation models tailored to each industry and client's service environment to provide optimal recommendation results.
With the AI Pack, Upstage assists customers in customizing three AI technologies simultaneously: OCR technology, recommendation technology that takes into account customer information and product/service characteristics, and natural language processing (NLP) that enables meaning-based search. The Upstage AI Pack not only simplifies data processing, AI modeling, and indicator management, but also supports continuous updates and makes it easy to stay up-to-date with the latest AI technology.
Jae Boum Kim, Upstage's AI Product who spearheaded the research, expressed his excitement saying, "It is an honor to receive recognition from the academic community for our recommendation technology through a collaboration with our Hong Kong research team. We are proud to have gone beyond academic research to study commercial models that are actually used in the field." He further added, "We will continue to create better AI Packs that are tailored to the unique needs of various industries and client's service environments, and contribute to their success."
* File photo: Domestic AI startup Upstage announced that it won the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at 'WSDM2023' held in Singapore on the 7th.
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Upstage | Keunkyo Kim, PR Director | keunkyo@upstage.ai Upstage | Sungbeom Bae, PR Manager | sungbae@upstage.ai
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Upstage, founded in October 2020, offers a no-code/low-code solution called "Upstage AI Pack" to help clients innovate in AI. This solution applies the latest AI technologies to various industries in a customized manner. Upstage AI Pack includes OCR technology that extracts desired information from images, recommendation technology that considers customer information and product/service features, and natural language processing search technology that enables meaning-based search. By using the Upstage AI Pack, companies can easily utilize data processing, AI modeling, and metric management. They can also receive support for continuous updates, allowing them to use the latest AI technologies conveniently. Additionally, Upstage offers practical, AI-experienced training and a strong foundation in AI through an education content business. This helps cultivate differentiated professionals who can immediately contribute to AI business.
Led by top talents from global tech giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Naver, Upstage has established itself as a unique AI technology leader. The company has presented excellent papers at world-renowned AI conferences, such as NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ECCV, WWW, CHI, and WSDM. In addition, Upstage is the only Korean company to have won double-digit gold medals in Kaggle competitions. CEO Sung Kim, an associate professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is a world-class AI guru who has received the ACM Sigsoft Distinguished Paper Award four times for his research on bug prediction and automatic source code generation. He is also well-known as a lecturer for "Deep Learning for Everyone," which has recorded over 7 million views on YouTube. Co-founders include CTO Hwal-suk Lee, who led Naver's Visual AI/OCR and achieved global success, and CSO Eun-jeong Park, who led the modelling of the world's best translation tool, Papago.
