Input:
Your role is to assess whether a claim is well-stated or overstated based on the available evidence.

The Input Information will include:
1. Original Claim: The claim under evaluation.
2. Evidence: Research findings, including figures, tables, or other relevant data supporting the claim.

Optional. review comment: Reviewer feedback relevant to the claim's validity.

The claim should be assesed with the following:
Score: Evaluate the claim on a scale of 1 to 5, where:
- 1: Well-stated (accurately reflects the evidence without exaggeration)
- 5: Overstated (exaggerates findings' significance, magnitude, or certainty)

Justification: Provide a detailed explanation that includes:
- Instances of exaggerated wording, insufficient experiments, lack of experimental details, gaps in knowledge, weak grounding in evidence, or lack of acknowledgment of limitations.
- Direct citations from relevant evidence that substantiate your reasoning.
- If review comment is included only take into account the relevant comments towards the claim.

The claim to be assessed is:

Then, a Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) that maps sequences of BoI features to multiple low-dimensional user representations is proposed.

The review comment to be evaluated is:

[Advantages]
- Modeling users and user behaviors are essential, especially for web-based applications. The problem dealt with in this paper will be a promising application of representation learning based on neural networks.
- The structure of the proposed method is reasonable, especially for e-commerce applications.

[Drawbacks]
- I could not understand the novelty of the proposed method. The bag-of-features representation seems to be standard in several research fields such as computer vision, natural language processing, and data mining. The "multi-anchor module" seems to be almost the same as the multi-head attention module that is famous in the transformer. The time aggregation module does not contain a special trick. According to the introduction of this paper, the novelty of the proposed method is the ability for modeling life-long behaviors. However, I could not find any special techniques for handling life-long sequences. Please clearly state the technical novelty of the proposed method.
- The proposed method for modeling user behaviors dismisses both microscopic and macroscopic time-series characteristics, which would be significant for tracing user interest. More specifically, bag-of-interest representations remove microscopic characteristics, and the time aggregation module erases macroscopic features. If the authors believe that I have some misunderstanding, please justify it.
- When obtaining stable user representations, the knowledge of life-long learning will be required, since (1) users might have several completely different interests in their minds, (2) each interest lasts only a short term, especially in e-commerce applications, and (3) interests containing old behavior sequences might come back suddenly. This implies that almost all the information containing behavior sequences should be kept in user representations and this problem is exactly in the context of life-long learning. Please perform bibliographic surveys for life-long learning, describe the critical problem for the previous work, and present the novelty and advantage(s)  of the proposed method against the previous work.
- The downstream tasks in the experimental evaluations seem to be too easy and not suitable for evaluating the ability to handle long behavior sequences.

The evidence to be evaluated is:In this work, we are committed to learning universal user representation through truly lifelong user behavior sequences with arbitrary length. For this purpose, we propose a framework named Lifelong User Representation Model (LURM) which consists of two cascaded sub-models: Bag of Interests (BoI) and Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN).

In order to model extremely long lifelong user behavior sequence, we propose to aggregate the content of items under user purchases, clicks, or other behaviors at a certain granularity.

As shown in Fig. 1 (a), BoI consists of an item embedding module and a large-scale clustering module.

Inspired by these works, we design a contrastive learning task based on the relation between items drawn from a user to learn item embedding similar to item2vec Barkan & Koenigstein (2016). Given a set of users \(U=\{u_{1},u_{2},...,u_{|U|}\}\), each user \(u\in U\) corresponds to a behavior sequence \(\mathbf{S}=\big{\{}\mathbf{x_{1}},\mathbf{x_{2}},...,\mathbf{x_{|\mathcal{S}|}}\big{\}}\), where \(\mathbf{x_{i}}\in\mathbf{S}\) denotes the \(i\)-th item. \(|\mathbf{U}|\) and \(|\mathbf{S}|\) denote the number of users and the length of \(u\)'s behaviors respectively. Generally, the content of an item \(\mathbf{x}\) can be expressed as \(\{w_{1},w_{2},...,w_{|\mathbf{x}|}\}\), where \(w_{i}\) denotes a word from a vocabulary \(V\), and \(|\mathbf{x}|\) denotes the number of words in the content of \(\mathbf{x}\). Firstly, an encoder with average operation is used to generate item embedding \(c\):

Considering the large-scale item set, a subset \(\mathbf{E^{\prime}}\subset\mathbf{E}\) at the million level is sampled, and an efficient clustering algorithm named HDSC Yi et al. (2014) on \(\mathbf{E^{\prime}}\) is employed to cluster similar items into the same 'interest'. After clustering, the cluster centers \(\mathbf{C}\) make up an 'interest' vocabulary. Therefore each item can be attributed to one/multiple 'interest(s)' by hard/soft cluster assignment. Take hard cluster assignment as an example, each user can obtain his/her sparsely high-dimensional BoI feature \(\mathbf{b_{t}}\in\mathbb{R}^{D}\) in time period \(\mathbf{t}\) according to his/her behavior sequence \(\mathbf{S_{t}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{x_{1}},\mathbf{x_{2}},...,\mathbf{x_{|\mathbf{S_{t}}|}}\big{\}}\) : \[\mathbf{b_{t}}=[log(1+\Sigma_{i=1}^{|\mathbf{S_{t}}|}\mathbbm{1}_{\mathbf{x_{i}}\in c_{1}}),log(1+\Sigma_{i=1}^{|\mathbf{S_{t}}|}\mathbbm{1}_{\mathbf{x_{i}}\in c_{2}}), \tag{4}\] \[...,log(1+\Sigma_{i=1}^{|\mathbf{S_{t}}|}\mathbbm{1}_{\mathbf{x_{i}}\in c _{D}})]\] where \(\mathbf{x_{i}}\in c_{j}\) means item \(i\) is assigned to the cluster \(c_{j}\in\mathbf{C}\), \(\mathbbm{1}\) is an indicator function.

Therefore, we propose to get a BoI feature sequence by applying the BoI model at each time period of the whole lifelong time. Then, a Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) is designed to learn compressed user representations from the sequence of BoI features.

In this way, a sequence of BoI features \(\mathbf{B}=\{\mathbf{b_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{b_{t_{N}}}\}\) can be obtained, where \(\mathbf{b_{t_{i}}}\) denotes the BoI feature corresponding to the \(i\)-th time period \(\mathbf{t_{i}}\). After that, SMEN is used to map \(\mathbf{B}\) to low-dimensional user representations. As shown in Fig. 1 (b), SMEN consists of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

To capture diverse aspects of user preferences, a novel multi-anchor module is proposed. Specifically, suppose there are \(M\) anchors, and each of them indicates a certain preference of users. Let \(\mathbf{b}\) be a BoI feature, the module converts \(\mathbf{b}\) to \(M\) low-dimensional representations as shown in Fig. 2. Each representation is computed as \[\mathbf{r^{i}}=ReLU(\mathbf{\alpha_{i}^{T}}f(\mathbf{b}))=ReLU(\sum_{j}^{D}\alpha_{ij}f(b_ {j}))=ReLU(\sum_{j}^{D}\alpha_{ij}b_{j}\mathbf{W_{j}^{e}}), \tag{5}\] where \(f(b_{j})=b_{j}\mathbf{W_{j}^{e}}\) is the 'interest' embedding function, \(b_{j}\) is the \(j\)-th element of \(\mathbf{b}\), \(\mathbf{W^{e}}=\left(\mathbf{W_{1}^{e}},\mathbf{W_{2}^{e}},...,\mathbf{W_{D}^{e}}\right)^{T}\) is the embedding matrix. And \(\alpha_{ij}\) is the attention weight between the \(i\)-th anchor and the \(j\)-th 'interest', which measures the portion assigned to the \(i\)-th preference from the \(j\)-th behavior 'interest'. The weight \(\alpha_{ij}\) is defined as \[\alpha_{ij}=\frac{\exp(\mathbf{W_{i}^{a}}\mathbf{k_{j}})}{\sum_{l}\exp(\mathbf{W_{l}^{a}} \mathbf{k_{j}})}, \tag{6}\]

Finally, a group of different aggregated representations \(\mathbf{R}=\{\mathbf{r^{1}},\mathbf{r^{2}},...,\mathbf{r^{M}}\}\) can be obtained (\(\mathbf{M}\) indicates the total number of anchors). In this way, we can learn different aspects of user preferences. Specially, experiments prove that SMEN can achieve almost lossless dimensionality reduction mainly due to the multi-anchor module. Through the multi-anchor module, a sequence of representation groups \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}=\{\mathbf{R_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{R_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{R_{t_{N}}}\}\) for each user is obtained, where \(\mathbf{R_{t_{i}}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{1}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{M}}\}\) is a representation group generated by multi-anchor module corresponding to the BoI feature \(\mathbf{b_{t_{i}}}\) in time period \(\mathbf{t_{i}}\). In the time aggregation module, each sequence \(\mathbf{R^{i}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{N}}^{i}}\}\) is aggregated separately to yield a new representation \(\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{i}}\in\mathbb{R}^{H}\). Thus the variable-size representation sequence \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}\) can be transformed into \(M\) fixed-size representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\).

Under a time division \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}\), we have obtained \(M\) representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\) through the BoI, multi-anchor module and time aggregation module as introduced above.

Generally, user behavior in this work is aggregated monthly and yearly, i.e. \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}=\big{\{}\mathbf{t_{1}^{\prime}},\bm {t_{2}^{\prime}},...,\mathbf{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}\big{\}}\) (e.g., if the length of time period is 5 years, \(\mathbf{N}\) is 60 for monthly granularity, and \(\mathbf{N^{\prime}}\) is 5 for yearly granularity). Thus two sequences of BoI feature \(\mathbf{B}=\{\mathbf{b_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{b_{t_{N}}}\}\) and \(\mathbf{B^{\prime}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{b_{t_{1}^{\prime}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}^{\prime}}},...,\bm {b_{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}}\big{\}}\) at different scales correspondingly are obtained. Then, two groups of representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\) and \(\mathbf{\tilde{R^{\prime}}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r^{ \prime}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{M}}\big{\}}\) are obtained after the multi-anchor module and time aggregation module with parameter sharing.

The switch function controls the fusion between BoI feature sequences of different scales. The output of this module \(\mathbf{\hat{R}}=[\mathbf{\hat{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\hat{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\hat{r}^{M}}]\) is served as the final user representation.

The function \(h(\cdot)\) is computed as \[\mathbf{v} =ReLU([\mathbf{W_{1}^{h_{1}}}\mathbf{\hat{r}^{1}},\mathbf{W_{2}^{h_{1}}}\mathbf{ \hat{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{W_{M}^{h_{1}}}\mathbf{\hat{r}^{M}}]) \tag{8}\] \[h(\mathbf{v}) =\mathbf{W^{h_{2}}}ReLU(\mathbf{v}+mix(\mathbf{v},\mathbf{W^{h_{2}}}).\]

Two behavior sequences drawn from the same user are treated as a positive pair, and behavior sequences from other users are negatives. All sequences are continuous sub-sequences randomly sampled from the whole life time \(\mathbf{T}\).

The entire behavior sequences were input into SMEN because the length of input sequence only depends on the time interval.

In order to retain details as many as possible, the size of the 'interest' vocabulary was set to \(10^{5}\), and the number of anchors \(M\) was set to 10 in our experiments.

Its success can be attributed to lifelong user behavior modeling and lossless dimensionality reduction of SMEN.

It may be that the item embedding we learned is better on the industrial dataset and then LURM achieved similar results compared with BoI, indicating the ability of SMEN to compress representation losslessly.

And It can be seen that the representation was improved through the further learning of SMEN with self-supervised tasks and the ability to encode temporal variation. In this work, a novel framework named LURM is proposed to model lifelong user behaviors with any length.

Input: Figure 1: Illustration of our Lifelong User Representation Model (LURM) for user understanding. LURM consists of two sub-model: (a) Bag of Interests (BoI) is used to aggregate user behavior data at ‘interest’ granularity, and is composed of an item embedding module and a large scale clustering module. We apply the BoI model on lifelong behavior data to generate multi-scale BoI feature sequences, (b) Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) is used to learn compressed user representations from BoI features sequences, and is composed of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

Input: Figure 2: Illustration of the multi-anchor module in SMEN. The module outputs a group of diverse representations by assigning different portions of each ‘interest’ to different anchors. The • denotes the dot product operation, ⊗ denotes the scalar multiply operation, and ⊕ denotes vector sum operation.

Input:
You should:
1. Carefully review the claim and the text and image evidence. Summarize how the evidence influenced your evaluation of the claim's validity and strength and briefly explain whether the claim is wellstated or overstated on a scale of 1 to 5 (up to 100 words).
2. Provide the final score (choose from 1 to 5), in the format: <score>{score}</score>.

Output:
I've reviewed the claim: "Then, a Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) that maps sequences of BoI features to multiple low-dimensional user representations is proposed."

This claim appears to be well-stated (Score 1) as it accurately describes SMEN's functionality without exaggeration. The evidence directly supports this through:
- Detailed architectural description showing how SMEN maps BoI features to representations
- Clear explanation of the multi-anchor module's role in generating multiple representations
- Mathematical formulas demonstrating the mapping process
- Figures illustrating the network architecture and mapping workflow

The reviewer comments, while critical of novelty and some aspects, don't dispute the basic functional description made in the claim. The claim simply states what SMEN does without overstating its capabilities or novelty.

<score>1</score>


Input:
Your role is to assess whether a claim is well-stated or overstated based on the available evidence.

The Input Information will include:
1. Original Claim: The claim under evaluation.
2. Evidence: Research findings, including figures, tables, or other relevant data supporting the claim.

Optional. review comment: Reviewer feedback relevant to the claim's validity.

The claim should be assesed with the following:
Score: Evaluate the claim on a scale of 1 to 5, where:
- 1: Well-stated (accurately reflects the evidence without exaggeration)
- 5: Overstated (exaggerates findings' significance, magnitude, or certainty)

Justification: Provide a detailed explanation that includes:
- Instances of exaggerated wording, insufficient experiments, lack of experimental details, gaps in knowledge, weak grounding in evidence, or lack of acknowledgment of limitations.
- Direct citations from relevant evidence that substantiate your reasoning.
- If review comment is included only take into account the relevant comments towards the claim.

The claim to be assessed is:

SMEN consists of three modules: a multi-anchor module which can learn different aspects of user preferences, a time aggregation module which can model evolution of user behaviors, and a multi-scale aggregation module which can learn and aggregate BoI features in different scales.

The evidence to be evaluated is:As shown in Fig. 1 (b), SMEN consists of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

To capture diverse aspects of user preferences, a novel multi-anchor module is proposed. Specifically, suppose there are \(M\) anchors, and each of them indicates a certain preference of users. Let \(\mathbf{b}\) be a BoI feature, the module converts \(\mathbf{b}\) to \(M\) low-dimensional representations as shown in Fig. 2. Each representation is computed as \[\mathbf{r^{i}}=ReLU(\mathbf{\alpha_{i}^{T}}f(\mathbf{b}))=ReLU(\sum_{j}^{D}\alpha_{ij}f(b_ {j}))=ReLU(\sum_{j}^{D}\alpha_{ij}b_{j}\mathbf{W_{j}^{e}}), \tag{5}\] where \(f(b_{j})=b_{j}\mathbf{W_{j}^{e}}\) is the 'interest' embedding function, \(b_{j}\) is the \(j\)-th element of \(\mathbf{b}\), \(\mathbf{W^{e}}=\left(\mathbf{W_{1}^{e}},\mathbf{W_{2}^{e}},...,\mathbf{W_{D}^{e}}\right)^{T}\) is the embedding matrix. And \(\alpha_{ij}\) is the attention weight between the \(i\)-th anchor and the \(j\)-th 'interest', which measures the portion assigned to the \(i\)-th preference from the \(j\)-th behavior 'interest'. The weight \(\alpha_{ij}\) is defined as \[\alpha_{ij}=\frac{\exp(\mathbf{W_{i}^{a}}\mathbf{k_{j}})}{\sum_{l}\exp(\mathbf{W_{l}^{a}} \mathbf{k_{j}})}, \tag{6}\]

Due to the different anchor vectors, different attention weights can be generated for each 'interest'.

In this way, we can learn different aspects of user preferences. Specially, experiments prove that SMEN can achieve almost lossless dimensionality reduction mainly due to the multi-anchor module. Through the multi-anchor module, a sequence of representation groups \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}=\{\mathbf{R_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{R_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{R_{t_{N}}}\}\) for each user is obtained, where \(\mathbf{R_{t_{i}}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{1}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{M}}\}\) is a representation group generated by multi-anchor module corresponding to the BoI feature \(\mathbf{b_{t_{i}}}\) in time period \(\mathbf{t_{i}}\). In the time aggregation module, each sequence \(\mathbf{R^{i}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{N}}^{i}}\}\) is aggregated separately to yield a new representation \(\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{i}}\in\mathbb{R}^{H}\). Thus the variable-size representation sequence \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}\) can be transformed into \(M\) fixed-size representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\).

Considering that GRU has fewer parameters and is less computationally intensive, GRU is adopted to the time aggregation module in this work. Under a time division \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}\), we have obtained \(M\) representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\) through the BoI, multi-anchor module and time aggregation module as introduced above.

To address this trade-off, multi-scale aggregation module is designed. The module captures diverse patterns from user behavior by aggregating several representations generated at different granularities. Generally, user behavior in this work is aggregated monthly and yearly, i.e. \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}=\big{\{}\mathbf{t_{1}^{\prime}},\bm {t_{2}^{\prime}},...,\mathbf{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}\big{\}}\) (e.g., if the length of time period is 5 years, \(\mathbf{N}\) is 60 for monthly granularity, and \(\mathbf{N^{\prime}}\) is 5 for yearly granularity). Thus two sequences of BoI feature \(\mathbf{B}=\{\mathbf{b_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{b_{t_{N}}}\}\) and \(\mathbf{B^{\prime}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{b_{t_{1}^{\prime}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}^{\prime}}},...,\bm {b_{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}}\big{\}}\) at different scales correspondingly are obtained. Then, two groups of representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\) and \(\mathbf{\tilde{R^{\prime}}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r^{ \prime}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{M}}\big{\}}\) are obtained after the multi-anchor module and time aggregation module with parameter sharing.

The switch function controls the fusion between BoI feature sequences of different scales. The output of this module \(\mathbf{\hat{R}}=[\mathbf{\hat{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\hat{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\hat{r}^{M}}]\) is served as the final user representation.

It can be seen that using multi-scale aggregation module can achieve significant improvements on user profiling prediction tasks, while the benefits disappear on category preference tasks.

Taking BoI as a benchmark, it can be seen that LURM achieves almost lossless dimensionality reduction compared to LURM(1anchor-128) and LURM(1anchor-1280), which verifies the effectiveness of the multi-anchor module.

And It can be seen that the representation was improved through the further learning of SMEN with self-supervised tasks and the ability to encode temporal variation.

Input: Figure 1: Illustration of our Lifelong User Representation Model (LURM) for user understanding. LURM consists of two sub-model: (a) Bag of Interests (BoI) is used to aggregate user behavior data at ‘interest’ granularity, and is composed of an item embedding module and a large scale clustering module. We apply the BoI model on lifelong behavior data to generate multi-scale BoI feature sequences, (b) Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) is used to learn compressed user representations from BoI features sequences, and is composed of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

Input:
You should:
1. Carefully review the claim and the text and image evidence. Summarize how the evidence influenced your evaluation of the claim's validity and strength and briefly explain whether the claim is wellstated or overstated on a scale of 1 to 5 (up to 100 words).
2. Provide the final score (choose from 1 to 5), in the format: <score>{score}</score>.

Output:
After reviewing the evidence, the claim accurately describes the three main modules of SMEN and their core functionalities. The evidence directly supports that:
1. The multi-anchor module learns different aspects of user preferences through multiple anchor vectors and attention weights
2. The time aggregation module models behavioral evolution by aggregating temporal sequences using GRU
3. The multi-scale aggregation module learns and aggregates BoI features at different scales (monthly and yearly)

The claim is well-stated as it aligns precisely with the model architecture and functionality described in the evidence without exaggeration or overstatement.

<score>1</score>


Input:
Your role is to assess whether a claim is well-stated or overstated based on the available evidence.

The Input Information will include:
1. Original Claim: The claim under evaluation.
2. Evidence: Research findings, including figures, tables, or other relevant data supporting the claim.

Optional. review comment: Reviewer feedback relevant to the claim's validity.

The claim should be assesed with the following:
Score: Evaluate the claim on a scale of 1 to 5, where:
- 1: Well-stated (accurately reflects the evidence without exaggeration)
- 5: Overstated (exaggerates findings' significance, magnitude, or certainty)

Justification: Provide a detailed explanation that includes:
- Instances of exaggerated wording, insufficient experiments, lack of experimental details, gaps in knowledge, weak grounding in evidence, or lack of acknowledgment of limitations.
- Direct citations from relevant evidence that substantiate your reasoning.
- If review comment is included only take into account the relevant comments towards the claim.

The claim to be assessed is:

SMEN consists of three modules: a multi-anchor module which can learn different aspects of user preferences, a time aggregation module which can model evolution of user behaviors, and a multi-scale aggregation module which can learn and aggregate BoI features in different scales.

The review comment to be evaluated is:

Strengths:

--Previous work cannot model universal user representation based on lifelong sequences of user behavior since registration and challenging to make full use of highly long user behavior sequences accumulated in Internet service platforms.

-- This work proposes a universal Lifelong User Representation Model to encode user behaviors in any period with a sparse vector with super-high dimension and map these user features to user representations with almost lossless dimensionality reduction. In this way, the model could easily learn different aspects of user preferences in extremely long sequences and generalize to other downstream tasks.

Weaknesses:

-- The structure of related works is not clear enough. At the end of universal user modeling, this work focuses on the conclusion that previous work dedicated to learning universal user representations cannot leverage information from lifelong user behaviors instead of their generalization ability. The same problem also appeared at the end of lifelong user modeling.

-- In a multi-scale aggregation module, this work captures diverse patterns from user behavior by aggregating several representations generated at different time granularities. However, this method could only use information intra-corresponding representation of every time granularity and cannot explore the information inter different time granularities.

-- The explanation of the considerable gap between BoI and LURM on the two datasets is unconvincing. On the industrial dataset, the performance of BOI is better than LURM, which proved that the design of SMEN cannot bring benefits for BOI.

-- In different downstream tasks, the benefits on category preference identification tasks are tiny, even using behaviors of 5 years on this task. There is no explanation about this phenomenon, and it proves BOI cannot learn much preference information about user behaviors on different categories.

-- This work did not design experiments about multi-scale aggregation modules to prove the effectiveness of process representations of different time granularities.

-- There are some format problems in the paper, such as no period at the end of the first paragraph of the introduction.

The evidence to be evaluated is:As shown in Fig. 1 (b), SMEN consists of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

To capture diverse aspects of user preferences, a novel multi-anchor module is proposed. Specifically, suppose there are \(M\) anchors, and each of them indicates a certain preference of users. Let \(\mathbf{b}\) be a BoI feature, the module converts \(\mathbf{b}\) to \(M\) low-dimensional representations as shown in Fig. 2. Each representation is computed as \[\mathbf{r^{i}}=ReLU(\mathbf{\alpha_{i}^{T}}f(\mathbf{b}))=ReLU(\sum_{j}^{D}\alpha_{ij}f(b_ {j}))=ReLU(\sum_{j}^{D}\alpha_{ij}b_{j}\mathbf{W_{j}^{e}}), \tag{5}\] where \(f(b_{j})=b_{j}\mathbf{W_{j}^{e}}\) is the 'interest' embedding function, \(b_{j}\) is the \(j\)-th element of \(\mathbf{b}\), \(\mathbf{W^{e}}=\left(\mathbf{W_{1}^{e}},\mathbf{W_{2}^{e}},...,\mathbf{W_{D}^{e}}\right)^{T}\) is the embedding matrix. And \(\alpha_{ij}\) is the attention weight between the \(i\)-th anchor and the \(j\)-th 'interest', which measures the portion assigned to the \(i\)-th preference from the \(j\)-th behavior 'interest'. The weight \(\alpha_{ij}\) is defined as \[\alpha_{ij}=\frac{\exp(\mathbf{W_{i}^{a}}\mathbf{k_{j}})}{\sum_{l}\exp(\mathbf{W_{l}^{a}} \mathbf{k_{j}})}, \tag{6}\]

Due to the different anchor vectors, different attention weights can be generated for each 'interest'.

In this way, we can learn different aspects of user preferences. Specially, experiments prove that SMEN can achieve almost lossless dimensionality reduction mainly due to the multi-anchor module. Through the multi-anchor module, a sequence of representation groups \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}=\{\mathbf{R_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{R_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{R_{t_{N}}}\}\) for each user is obtained, where \(\mathbf{R_{t_{i}}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{1}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{M}}\}\) is a representation group generated by multi-anchor module corresponding to the BoI feature \(\mathbf{b_{t_{i}}}\) in time period \(\mathbf{t_{i}}\). In the time aggregation module, each sequence \(\mathbf{R^{i}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{N}}^{i}}\}\) is aggregated separately to yield a new representation \(\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{i}}\in\mathbb{R}^{H}\). Thus the variable-size representation sequence \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}\) can be transformed into \(M\) fixed-size representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\).

Considering that GRU has fewer parameters and is less computationally intensive, GRU is adopted to the time aggregation module in this work. Under a time division \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}\), we have obtained \(M\) representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\) through the BoI, multi-anchor module and time aggregation module as introduced above.

To address this trade-off, multi-scale aggregation module is designed. The module captures diverse patterns from user behavior by aggregating several representations generated at different granularities. Generally, user behavior in this work is aggregated monthly and yearly, i.e. \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}=\big{\{}\mathbf{t_{1}^{\prime}},\bm {t_{2}^{\prime}},...,\mathbf{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}\big{\}}\) (e.g., if the length of time period is 5 years, \(\mathbf{N}\) is 60 for monthly granularity, and \(\mathbf{N^{\prime}}\) is 5 for yearly granularity). Thus two sequences of BoI feature \(\mathbf{B}=\{\mathbf{b_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{b_{t_{N}}}\}\) and \(\mathbf{B^{\prime}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{b_{t_{1}^{\prime}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}^{\prime}}},...,\bm {b_{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}}\big{\}}\) at different scales correspondingly are obtained. Then, two groups of representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\) and \(\mathbf{\tilde{R^{\prime}}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r^{ \prime}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{M}}\big{\}}\) are obtained after the multi-anchor module and time aggregation module with parameter sharing.

The switch function controls the fusion between BoI feature sequences of different scales. The output of this module \(\mathbf{\hat{R}}=[\mathbf{\hat{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\hat{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\hat{r}^{M}}]\) is served as the final user representation.

It can be seen that using multi-scale aggregation module can achieve significant improvements on user profiling prediction tasks, while the benefits disappear on category preference tasks.

Taking BoI as a benchmark, it can be seen that LURM achieves almost lossless dimensionality reduction compared to LURM(1anchor-128) and LURM(1anchor-1280), which verifies the effectiveness of the multi-anchor module.

And It can be seen that the representation was improved through the further learning of SMEN with self-supervised tasks and the ability to encode temporal variation.

Input: Figure 1: Illustration of our Lifelong User Representation Model (LURM) for user understanding. LURM consists of two sub-model: (a) Bag of Interests (BoI) is used to aggregate user behavior data at ‘interest’ granularity, and is composed of an item embedding module and a large scale clustering module. We apply the BoI model on lifelong behavior data to generate multi-scale BoI feature sequences, (b) Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) is used to learn compressed user representations from BoI features sequences, and is composed of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

Input:
You should:
1. Carefully review the claim and the text and image evidence. Summarize how the evidence influenced your evaluation of the claim's validity and strength and briefly explain whether the claim is wellstated or overstated on a scale of 1 to 5 (up to 100 words).
2. Provide the final score (choose from 1 to 5), in the format: <score>{score}</score>.

Output:
Based on the evidence provided, I'll evaluate the claim about SMEN's three modules:

The evidence strongly supports that SMEN consists of the three claimed modules, with clear descriptions and mathematical formulations for each:
- Multi-anchor module is detailed with equations 5-6 showing how it learns different aspects of user preferences
- Time aggregation module using GRU is explained for modeling temporal evolution
- Multi-scale aggregation module is described as capturing patterns at different time granularities (monthly/yearly)

The claim is well-stated and accurately reflects the model architecture shown in Fig. 1(b) and described in detail in the text. While a reviewer noted some limitations about inter-granularity information exploration, the basic structural description in the claim remains accurate.

<score>1</score>

The claim receives a score of 1 (well-stated) as it simply describes the architectural components of SMEN without making exaggerated claims about their capabilities or performance. The evidence directly supports each module's existence and basic functions as stated.


Input:
Your role is to assess whether a claim is well-stated or overstated based on the available evidence.

The Input Information will include:
1. Original Claim: The claim under evaluation.
2. Evidence: Research findings, including figures, tables, or other relevant data supporting the claim.

Optional. review comment: Reviewer feedback relevant to the claim's validity.

The claim should be assesed with the following:
Score: Evaluate the claim on a scale of 1 to 5, where:
- 1: Well-stated (accurately reflects the evidence without exaggeration)
- 5: Overstated (exaggerates findings' significance, magnitude, or certainty)

Justification: Provide a detailed explanation that includes:
- Instances of exaggerated wording, insufficient experiments, lack of experimental details, gaps in knowledge, weak grounding in evidence, or lack of acknowledgment of limitations.
- Direct citations from relevant evidence that substantiate your reasoning.
- If review comment is included only take into account the relevant comments towards the claim.

The claim to be assessed is:

SMEN consists of three modules: a multi-anchor module which can learn different aspects of user preferences, a time aggregation module which can model evolution of user behaviors, and a multi-scale aggregation module which can learn and aggregate BoI features in different scales.

The review comment to be evaluated is:

Strengths:

1. This paper is easy to understand.
2. The problem studied in this paper is important.
3. The proposed multi-scale aggregation method is interesting.

Weaknesses:

1. The contribution of this paper can be somewhat incremental. First, the multi-anchor attention network is also called "multi-aspect attention", which has been widely used in many scenarios [1,2,3]. A very similar contrastive model pertaining approach is also studied in [4]. Thus, the contributions of this paper are somewhat incremental.
2. Discussions and comparisons on universal user modeling methods are insufficient. The authors only include PTUM as the baseline but do not discuss it in Section 2.1. There are also many other methods like [4,5]. They are also not cited nor compared.
3. The design of the item embedding method is problematic. Different from texts that there are rich relations between adjacent words, even adjacent behaviors can be rather random. Thus, it may not be suitable to learn item embeddings by regarding items as words and user behavior sequences as sentences. There are many methods for item embedding learning such as PinSage [6].
4. Compared baselines are also insufficient. As mentioned in the second point, there are many user model pretraining methods that are not compared. In addition, the compared basic user modeling techniques are also rather weak (e.g., CNN, HAN, Doc2Vec and TF-IDF).
5. Some details are unclear. PTUM and PeterRec require fine-tuning the user model in downstream tasks. However, in this work it is not clear whether the pretrained user model is finetuned.
6. The selection of some hyperparameters seems to be arbitrary, e.g., the number of anchors and the window size $\beta$. The authors do not provide experiments to show the influence of several key hyperparameters.
7. The generality of the proposed method is not verified. It is not clear whether the proposed method can be generalized to other types of user models.

Minor:

There are some typos and grammatical issues. For example, "committed to learn" and "Comparisonn".

[1] Event detection using hierarchical multi-aspect attention. WWW 2019.

[2] ARP: Aspect-aware neural review rating prediction. CIKM 2019.

[3] Hybrid graph convolutional networks with multi-head attention for location recommendation. World Wide Web 23.6 (2020): 3125-3151.

[4] Contrastive Pre-training for Sequential Recommendation. arXiv e-prints (2020): arXiv-2010.

[5] Parameter-efficient transfer from sequential behaviors for user modeling and recommendation. SIGIR. 2020.

[6] Graph convolutional neural networks for web-scale recommender systems. KDD 2018.

The evidence to be evaluated is:As shown in Fig. 1 (b), SMEN consists of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

To capture diverse aspects of user preferences, a novel multi-anchor module is proposed. Specifically, suppose there are \(M\) anchors, and each of them indicates a certain preference of users. Let \(\mathbf{b}\) be a BoI feature, the module converts \(\mathbf{b}\) to \(M\) low-dimensional representations as shown in Fig. 2. Each representation is computed as \[\mathbf{r^{i}}=ReLU(\mathbf{\alpha_{i}^{T}}f(\mathbf{b}))=ReLU(\sum_{j}^{D}\alpha_{ij}f(b_ {j}))=ReLU(\sum_{j}^{D}\alpha_{ij}b_{j}\mathbf{W_{j}^{e}}), \tag{5}\] where \(f(b_{j})=b_{j}\mathbf{W_{j}^{e}}\) is the 'interest' embedding function, \(b_{j}\) is the \(j\)-th element of \(\mathbf{b}\), \(\mathbf{W^{e}}=\left(\mathbf{W_{1}^{e}},\mathbf{W_{2}^{e}},...,\mathbf{W_{D}^{e}}\right)^{T}\) is the embedding matrix. And \(\alpha_{ij}\) is the attention weight between the \(i\)-th anchor and the \(j\)-th 'interest', which measures the portion assigned to the \(i\)-th preference from the \(j\)-th behavior 'interest'. The weight \(\alpha_{ij}\) is defined as \[\alpha_{ij}=\frac{\exp(\mathbf{W_{i}^{a}}\mathbf{k_{j}})}{\sum_{l}\exp(\mathbf{W_{l}^{a}} \mathbf{k_{j}})}, \tag{6}\]

Due to the different anchor vectors, different attention weights can be generated for each 'interest'.

In this way, we can learn different aspects of user preferences. Specially, experiments prove that SMEN can achieve almost lossless dimensionality reduction mainly due to the multi-anchor module. Through the multi-anchor module, a sequence of representation groups \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}=\{\mathbf{R_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{R_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{R_{t_{N}}}\}\) for each user is obtained, where \(\mathbf{R_{t_{i}}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{1}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{M}}\}\) is a representation group generated by multi-anchor module corresponding to the BoI feature \(\mathbf{b_{t_{i}}}\) in time period \(\mathbf{t_{i}}\). In the time aggregation module, each sequence \(\mathbf{R^{i}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{N}}^{i}}\}\) is aggregated separately to yield a new representation \(\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{i}}\in\mathbb{R}^{H}\). Thus the variable-size representation sequence \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}\) can be transformed into \(M\) fixed-size representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\).

Considering that GRU has fewer parameters and is less computationally intensive, GRU is adopted to the time aggregation module in this work. Under a time division \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}\), we have obtained \(M\) representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\) through the BoI, multi-anchor module and time aggregation module as introduced above.

To address this trade-off, multi-scale aggregation module is designed. The module captures diverse patterns from user behavior by aggregating several representations generated at different granularities. Generally, user behavior in this work is aggregated monthly and yearly, i.e. \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}=\big{\{}\mathbf{t_{1}^{\prime}},\bm {t_{2}^{\prime}},...,\mathbf{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}\big{\}}\) (e.g., if the length of time period is 5 years, \(\mathbf{N}\) is 60 for monthly granularity, and \(\mathbf{N^{\prime}}\) is 5 for yearly granularity). Thus two sequences of BoI feature \(\mathbf{B}=\{\mathbf{b_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{b_{t_{N}}}\}\) and \(\mathbf{B^{\prime}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{b_{t_{1}^{\prime}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}^{\prime}}},...,\bm {b_{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}}\big{\}}\) at different scales correspondingly are obtained. Then, two groups of representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\) and \(\mathbf{\tilde{R^{\prime}}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r^{ \prime}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{M}}\big{\}}\) are obtained after the multi-anchor module and time aggregation module with parameter sharing.

The switch function controls the fusion between BoI feature sequences of different scales. The output of this module \(\mathbf{\hat{R}}=[\mathbf{\hat{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\hat{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\hat{r}^{M}}]\) is served as the final user representation.

It can be seen that using multi-scale aggregation module can achieve significant improvements on user profiling prediction tasks, while the benefits disappear on category preference tasks.

Taking BoI as a benchmark, it can be seen that LURM achieves almost lossless dimensionality reduction compared to LURM(1anchor-128) and LURM(1anchor-1280), which verifies the effectiveness of the multi-anchor module.

And It can be seen that the representation was improved through the further learning of SMEN with self-supervised tasks and the ability to encode temporal variation.

Input: Figure 1: Illustration of our Lifelong User Representation Model (LURM) for user understanding. LURM consists of two sub-model: (a) Bag of Interests (BoI) is used to aggregate user behavior data at ‘interest’ granularity, and is composed of an item embedding module and a large scale clustering module. We apply the BoI model on lifelong behavior data to generate multi-scale BoI feature sequences, (b) Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) is used to learn compressed user representations from BoI features sequences, and is composed of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

Input:
You should:
1. Carefully review the claim and the text and image evidence. Summarize how the evidence influenced your evaluation of the claim's validity and strength and briefly explain whether the claim is wellstated or overstated on a scale of 1 to 5 (up to 100 words).
2. Provide the final score (choose from 1 to 5), in the format: <score>{score}</score>.

Output:
After reviewing the evidence and claim, I find that the claim is generally accurate but has some minor overstatements. The evidence clearly shows SMEN does contain the three stated modules (multi-anchor, time aggregation, and multi-scale aggregation). However, the wording "can learn different aspects" and "can model evolution" implies proven capabilities that aren't fully demonstrated in the evidence. While the multi-anchor module is shown to achieve "almost lossless dimensionality reduction" and the multi-scale module shows "significant improvements" on some tasks, the evidence doesn't conclusively prove the full extent of capabilities claimed. The review comments also raise valid concerns about the incremental nature of the multi-anchor attention approach and insufficient experimental validation of key parameters.

<score>2</score>

Justification:
1. The basic structural claim about the three modules is well-supported by both the text and Figure 1(b).
2. The evidence shows some positive results but doesn't fully validate all claimed capabilities
3. Reviewer comments highlight that similar multi-anchor/multi-aspect attention approaches already exist
4. The review notes insufficient validation of hyperparameters and generalizability
5. While slightly optimistic in describing capabilities, the claim remains relatively close to what the evidence supports


Input:
Your role is to assess whether a claim is well-stated or overstated based on the available evidence.

The Input Information will include:
1. Original Claim: The claim under evaluation.
2. Evidence: Research findings, including figures, tables, or other relevant data supporting the claim.

Optional. review comment: Reviewer feedback relevant to the claim's validity.

The claim should be assesed with the following:
Score: Evaluate the claim on a scale of 1 to 5, where:
- 1: Well-stated (accurately reflects the evidence without exaggeration)
- 5: Overstated (exaggerates findings' significance, magnitude, or certainty)

Justification: Provide a detailed explanation that includes:
- Instances of exaggerated wording, insufficient experiments, lack of experimental details, gaps in knowledge, weak grounding in evidence, or lack of acknowledgment of limitations.
- Direct citations from relevant evidence that substantiate your reasoning.
- If review comment is included only take into account the relevant comments towards the claim.

The claim to be assessed is:

SMEN consists of three modules: a multi-anchor module which can learn different aspects of user preferences, a time aggregation module which can model evolution of user behaviors, and a multi-scale aggregation module which can learn and aggregate BoI features in different scales.

The review comment to be evaluated is:

[Advantages]
- Modeling users and user behaviors are essential, especially for web-based applications. The problem dealt with in this paper will be a promising application of representation learning based on neural networks.
- The structure of the proposed method is reasonable, especially for e-commerce applications.

[Drawbacks]
- I could not understand the novelty of the proposed method. The bag-of-features representation seems to be standard in several research fields such as computer vision, natural language processing, and data mining. The "multi-anchor module" seems to be almost the same as the multi-head attention module that is famous in the transformer. The time aggregation module does not contain a special trick. According to the introduction of this paper, the novelty of the proposed method is the ability for modeling life-long behaviors. However, I could not find any special techniques for handling life-long sequences. Please clearly state the technical novelty of the proposed method.
- The proposed method for modeling user behaviors dismisses both microscopic and macroscopic time-series characteristics, which would be significant for tracing user interest. More specifically, bag-of-interest representations remove microscopic characteristics, and the time aggregation module erases macroscopic features. If the authors believe that I have some misunderstanding, please justify it.
- When obtaining stable user representations, the knowledge of life-long learning will be required, since (1) users might have several completely different interests in their minds, (2) each interest lasts only a short term, especially in e-commerce applications, and (3) interests containing old behavior sequences might come back suddenly. This implies that almost all the information containing behavior sequences should be kept in user representations and this problem is exactly in the context of life-long learning. Please perform bibliographic surveys for life-long learning, describe the critical problem for the previous work, and present the novelty and advantage(s)  of the proposed method against the previous work.
- The downstream tasks in the experimental evaluations seem to be too easy and not suitable for evaluating the ability to handle long behavior sequences.

The evidence to be evaluated is:As shown in Fig. 1 (b), SMEN consists of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

To capture diverse aspects of user preferences, a novel multi-anchor module is proposed. Specifically, suppose there are \(M\) anchors, and each of them indicates a certain preference of users. Let \(\mathbf{b}\) be a BoI feature, the module converts \(\mathbf{b}\) to \(M\) low-dimensional representations as shown in Fig. 2. Each representation is computed as \[\mathbf{r^{i}}=ReLU(\mathbf{\alpha_{i}^{T}}f(\mathbf{b}))=ReLU(\sum_{j}^{D}\alpha_{ij}f(b_ {j}))=ReLU(\sum_{j}^{D}\alpha_{ij}b_{j}\mathbf{W_{j}^{e}}), \tag{5}\] where \(f(b_{j})=b_{j}\mathbf{W_{j}^{e}}\) is the 'interest' embedding function, \(b_{j}\) is the \(j\)-th element of \(\mathbf{b}\), \(\mathbf{W^{e}}=\left(\mathbf{W_{1}^{e}},\mathbf{W_{2}^{e}},...,\mathbf{W_{D}^{e}}\right)^{T}\) is the embedding matrix. And \(\alpha_{ij}\) is the attention weight between the \(i\)-th anchor and the \(j\)-th 'interest', which measures the portion assigned to the \(i\)-th preference from the \(j\)-th behavior 'interest'. The weight \(\alpha_{ij}\) is defined as \[\alpha_{ij}=\frac{\exp(\mathbf{W_{i}^{a}}\mathbf{k_{j}})}{\sum_{l}\exp(\mathbf{W_{l}^{a}} \mathbf{k_{j}})}, \tag{6}\]

Due to the different anchor vectors, different attention weights can be generated for each 'interest'.

In this way, we can learn different aspects of user preferences. Specially, experiments prove that SMEN can achieve almost lossless dimensionality reduction mainly due to the multi-anchor module. Through the multi-anchor module, a sequence of representation groups \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}=\{\mathbf{R_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{R_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{R_{t_{N}}}\}\) for each user is obtained, where \(\mathbf{R_{t_{i}}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{1}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{M}}\}\) is a representation group generated by multi-anchor module corresponding to the BoI feature \(\mathbf{b_{t_{i}}}\) in time period \(\mathbf{t_{i}}\). In the time aggregation module, each sequence \(\mathbf{R^{i}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{N}}^{i}}\}\) is aggregated separately to yield a new representation \(\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{i}}\in\mathbb{R}^{H}\). Thus the variable-size representation sequence \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}\) can be transformed into \(M\) fixed-size representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\).

Considering that GRU has fewer parameters and is less computationally intensive, GRU is adopted to the time aggregation module in this work. Under a time division \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}\), we have obtained \(M\) representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\) through the BoI, multi-anchor module and time aggregation module as introduced above.

To address this trade-off, multi-scale aggregation module is designed. The module captures diverse patterns from user behavior by aggregating several representations generated at different granularities. Generally, user behavior in this work is aggregated monthly and yearly, i.e. \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}=\big{\{}\mathbf{t_{1}^{\prime}},\bm {t_{2}^{\prime}},...,\mathbf{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}\big{\}}\) (e.g., if the length of time period is 5 years, \(\mathbf{N}\) is 60 for monthly granularity, and \(\mathbf{N^{\prime}}\) is 5 for yearly granularity). Thus two sequences of BoI feature \(\mathbf{B}=\{\mathbf{b_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{b_{t_{N}}}\}\) and \(\mathbf{B^{\prime}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{b_{t_{1}^{\prime}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}^{\prime}}},...,\bm {b_{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}}\big{\}}\) at different scales correspondingly are obtained. Then, two groups of representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\) and \(\mathbf{\tilde{R^{\prime}}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r^{ \prime}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{M}}\big{\}}\) are obtained after the multi-anchor module and time aggregation module with parameter sharing.

The switch function controls the fusion between BoI feature sequences of different scales. The output of this module \(\mathbf{\hat{R}}=[\mathbf{\hat{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\hat{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\hat{r}^{M}}]\) is served as the final user representation.

It can be seen that using multi-scale aggregation module can achieve significant improvements on user profiling prediction tasks, while the benefits disappear on category preference tasks.

Taking BoI as a benchmark, it can be seen that LURM achieves almost lossless dimensionality reduction compared to LURM(1anchor-128) and LURM(1anchor-1280), which verifies the effectiveness of the multi-anchor module.

And It can be seen that the representation was improved through the further learning of SMEN with self-supervised tasks and the ability to encode temporal variation.

Input: Figure 1: Illustration of our Lifelong User Representation Model (LURM) for user understanding. LURM consists of two sub-model: (a) Bag of Interests (BoI) is used to aggregate user behavior data at ‘interest’ granularity, and is composed of an item embedding module and a large scale clustering module. We apply the BoI model on lifelong behavior data to generate multi-scale BoI feature sequences, (b) Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) is used to learn compressed user representations from BoI features sequences, and is composed of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

Input:
You should:
1. Carefully review the claim and the text and image evidence. Summarize how the evidence influenced your evaluation of the claim's validity and strength and briefly explain whether the claim is wellstated or overstated on a scale of 1 to 5 (up to 100 words).
2. Provide the final score (choose from 1 to 5), in the format: <score>{score}</score>.

Output:
After reviewing the evidence and review comments, I'd say the claim is moderately overstated. While the evidence does show SMEN contains the three described modules, the review raises valid concerns about their novelty and effectiveness. The multi-anchor module appears similar to existing multi-head attention mechanisms, the time aggregation module uses standard GRU without special innovations, and the multi-scale aggregation module shows mixed results (beneficial for profiling but not category preference tasks). The claim presents these components matter-of-factly without acknowledging their limitations or similarities to existing approaches.

<score>3</score>

The justification for this score:

1. The evidence confirms the existence of the three modules, supporting the basic structural claim.

2. However, the reviewer highlights:
- The multi-anchor approach closely resembles existing multi-head attention mechanisms
- The time aggregation module lacks novel techniques for handling life-long sequences
- The multi-scale module shows inconsistent benefits across different tasks

3. The claim would be better stated if it:
- Acknowledged the similarity to existing approaches
- Specified the mixed effectiveness of the multi-scale module
- Clarified the limitations in handling long-term temporal patterns

4. While not completely inaccurate, the claim overstates the uniqueness and effectiveness of these modules without necessary qualifications.


Input:
Your role is to assess whether a claim is well-stated or overstated based on the available evidence.

The Input Information will include:
1. Original Claim: The claim under evaluation.
2. Evidence: Research findings, including figures, tables, or other relevant data supporting the claim.

Optional. review comment: Reviewer feedback relevant to the claim's validity.

The claim should be assesed with the following:
Score: Evaluate the claim on a scale of 1 to 5, where:
- 1: Well-stated (accurately reflects the evidence without exaggeration)
- 5: Overstated (exaggerates findings' significance, magnitude, or certainty)

Justification: Provide a detailed explanation that includes:
- Instances of exaggerated wording, insufficient experiments, lack of experimental details, gaps in knowledge, weak grounding in evidence, or lack of acknowledgment of limitations.
- Direct citations from relevant evidence that substantiate your reasoning.
- If review comment is included only take into account the relevant comments towards the claim.

The claim to be assessed is:

Considering the consistency between user behaviors in different time periods, we introduce a contrastive loss function to the self-supervised training of SMEN.

The evidence to be evaluated is:Gu et al. (2020) proposed a network named self-supervised user modeling network (SUMN) to encode user behavior data into universal representation. They introduced a behavior consistency loss, which guided the model to fully identify and preserve valuable user information under a self-supervised learning framework.

Previous works have shown that considering long-term historical behavior sequences for user modeling can significantly improve the performance of different tasks

Ren _et al._ proposed a hierarchical periodic memory network for lifelong sequential modeling. They built a personalized memorization for each user, which remembers both intrinsic user tastes and multi-facet user interests with the learned while compressed memory.

In this work, we are committed to learning universal user representation through truly lifelong user behavior sequences with arbitrary length. For this purpose, we propose a framework named Lifelong User Representation Model (LURM) which consists of two cascaded sub-models: Bag of Interests (BoI) and Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN).

Recently, in natural language and image processing, dis criminative approaches based on contrastive learning in the latent space have shown great success in the field of representation learning, achieving state-of-the-art results. Inspired by these works, we design a contrastive learning task based on the relation between items drawn from a user to learn item embedding similar to item2vec Barkan & Koenigstein (2016).

To construct the contrastive learning task, we sample positive pairs from behavior sequences of users randomly. Specifically, two items \((\mathbf{x_{i}},\mathbf{y_{i}})\) are similar, i.e. a positive pair, if they are drawn from the same user behavior sequence and the time interval between the occurrence of these two items is less than \(\beta\), where \(\beta\) is the window size controlling the interval of the two user behaviors. Without loss of generality, the sampled mini-batch with batch size \(n\) can be denoted as \(\mathbf{\Delta}=\{\mathbf{x^{1}},\mathbf{y^{1}},\mathbf{x^{2}},\mathbf{y^{2}},...,\mathbf{x^{n}},\bm {y^{n}}\}\), where \((\mathbf{x^{i}},\mathbf{y^{i}})\) construct a positive pair drawn from the behavior sequence \(\mathbf{S^{i}_{t}}\) of the \(i\)-th user in batch. Then, the contrastive prediction task is defined to identify \(\mathbf{y^{i}}\) in \(\mathbf{\Delta}\setminus\{\mathbf{x^{i}}\}\) for a given \(\mathbf{x^{i}}\), and all other items in \(\mathbf{\Delta}\setminus\{\mathbf{x^{i}},\mathbf{y^{i}}\}\) are negatives. The loss for the positive pair \((\mathbf{x^{i}},\mathbf{y^{i}})\) is written as \[l(\mathbf{x^{i}},\mathbf{y^{i}})=-\log\frac{e^{g(\mathbf{x^{i}},\mathbf{y^{i}})/\tau}}{\sum_{ \nu\in\mathbf{\Delta},\nu\neq\mathbf{x^{i}}}e^{g(\mathbf{x^{i}},\mathbf{\nu})/\tau}}, \tag{2}\] where \(g(\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y})=\frac{\mathbf{e^{T}_{x}}\mathbf{e_{y}}}{\|\mathbf{e_{x}}\|\mathbf{e_{y}}\|}= \mathbf{e^{T}_{x}}\mathbf{e_{y}}\) denotes the cosine similarity between the embedding \(\mathbf{e_{x}}\) and the embedding \(\mathbf{e_{y}}\), and \(\tau\) is the temperature parameter.

Therefore, we propose to get a BoI feature sequence by applying the BoI model at each time period of the whole lifelong time. Then, a Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) is designed to learn compressed user representations from the sequence of BoI features. The lifelong time \(\mathbf{T}\) is divided into \(N\) parts at a fixed time interval, i.e. \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}\) and \(\mathbf{t_{i}}\) denotes the \(i\)-th time period.

In this way, a sequence of BoI features \(\mathbf{B}=\{\mathbf{b_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{b_{t_{N}}}\}\) can be obtained, where \(\mathbf{b_{t_{i}}}\) denotes the BoI feature corresponding to the \(i\)-th time period \(\mathbf{t_{i}}\).

As shown in Fig. 1 (b), SMEN consists of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

In this way, we can learn different aspects of user preferences.

Through the multi-anchor module, a sequence of representation groups \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}=\{\mathbf{R_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{R_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{R_{t_{N}}}\}\) for each user is obtained, where \(\mathbf{R_{t_{i}}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{1}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{M}}\}\) is a representation group generated by multi-anchor module corresponding to the BoI feature \(\mathbf{b_{t_{i}}}\) in time period \(\mathbf{t_{i}}\). In the time aggregation module, each sequence \(\mathbf{R^{i}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{N}}^{i}}\}\) is aggregated separately to yield a new representation \(\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{i}}\in\mathbb{R}^{H}\). Thus the variable-size representation sequence \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}\) can be transformed into \(M\) fixed-size representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\).

The module captures diverse patterns from user behavior by aggregating several representations generated at different granularities. Generally, user behavior in this work is aggregated monthly and yearly, i.e. \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}=\big{\{}\mathbf{t_{1}^{\prime}},\bm {t_{2}^{\prime}},...,\mathbf{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}\big{\}}\) (e.g., if the length of time period is 5 years, \(\mathbf{N}\) is 60 for monthly granularity, and \(\mathbf{N^{\prime}}\) is 5 for yearly granularity). Thus two sequences of BoI feature \(\mathbf{B}=\{\mathbf{b_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{b_{t_{N}}}\}\) and \(\mathbf{B^{\prime}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{b_{t_{1}^{\prime}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}^{\prime}}},...,\bm {b_{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}}\big{\}}\) at different scales correspondingly are obtained. Then, two groups of representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\) and \(\mathbf{\tilde{R^{\prime}}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r^{ \prime}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{M}}\big{\}}\) are obtained after the multi-anchor module and time aggregation module with parameter sharing.

As mentioned in 3.1.1, contrastive loss is also used to learn user representation in this network. In order to obtain a unified vector for contrastive learning, a nonlinear projection head is added, i.e. \(h(\cdot)\), as used in SimCLR Chen et al. (2020). The function \(h(\cdot)\) is computed as \[\mathbf{v} =ReLU([\mathbf{W_{1}^{h_{1}}}\mathbf{\hat{r}^{1}},\mathbf{W_{2}^{h_{1}}}\mathbf{ \hat{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{W_{M}^{h_{1}}}\mathbf{\hat{r}^{M}}]) \tag{8}\] \[h(\mathbf{v}) =\mathbf{W^{h_{2}}}ReLU(\mathbf{v}+mix(\mathbf{v},\mathbf{W^{h_{2}}}).\] The function \(mix(\mathbf{v},\mathbf{W^{h_{3}}})\) is to allow interaction between different preferences, and is implemented as \[mix(\mathbf{v},\mathbf{W^{h_{3}}})=r_{2}(\mathbf{W^{h_{3}}}r_{1}(\mathbf{v})), \tag{9}\]

Two behavior sequences drawn from the same user are treated as a positive pair, and behavior sequences from other users are negatives. All sequences are continuous sub-sequences randomly sampled from the whole life time \(\mathbf{T}\). Finally, the contrastive loss is defined the same as equation (3).

We constructed a training dataset \(D_{pt}^{I}\) for self-supervised user modeling by randomly sampling hundred million of users who have behaviors between 2016-06 and 2021-05, while taking behaviors occurred between 2021-07 and 2021-08 to form datasets \(\{D_{ds}^{I}(t)\}_{t}\).

From Table 2 and Table 3, we have observed that LURM has achieved better performance compared to other self-supervised and supervised methods. Its success can be attributed to lifelong user behavior modeling and lossless dimensionality reduction of SMEN.

It can be seen that the richer the behavior, the better the performance on user profiling prediction tasks. Compared to using only behaviors of two months, an average improvement of 9.75%/16.03% can be achieved when using behaviors of 5 years on these tasks. While the benefits of using richer behavioral data become small for category preference identification tasks. This is because these tasks are more focused on the short-term interests of users, and it can be observed that the best performance can be obtained when input with a length of one year is used on these tasks.

And It can be seen that the representation was improved through the further learning of SMEN with self-supervised tasks and the ability to encode temporal variation. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline Method & Books of Literature & Games of Sports & Outdoor-hunting & Musical Instrument \\ \hline TextCNN & 73.847/2.83 & 61.00/69.92 & 66.06/72.76 & 68.28/71.81 \\ HAN & 79.12/77.49 & 66.62/70.01 & 71.19/73.42 & 70.01/72.12 \\ \hline TF-IDF & 78.62/77.21 & 65.69/68.69 & 71.90/72.19 & 69.16/68.62 \\ Doc2Vec & 71.21/68.26 & 66.75/66.85 & 71.58/66.36 & 70.29/67.37 \\ \hline PTUM & 78.66/77.91 & 66.06/68.97 & 70.34/73.01 & 69.50/72.92 \\ SUMN & 79.57/77.73 & 66.83/70.63 & 72.27/73.44 & 70.61/73.43 \\ \hline BoI & 76.29/75.75 & 59.34/67.58 & 67.80/71.28 & 66.36/69.88 \\ LURM & **82.55/79.13** & **68.02/72.43** & **77.59/75.19** & **74.04/74.43** \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 2: Comparison in terms of AUC(%)/ACC(%) on the Amazon dataset. Several category preference identification tasks are evaluated. The best score is bold.

 \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline Method & Age & Baby Age & Clothing & Shoe & Coffee \\ \hline TextCNN & 86.40/61.02 & 72.19/66.01 & 76.64/76.13 & 84.33/80.24 & 80.49/79.46 \\ TF-IDF & 87.73/61.75 & 73.08/67.26 & 77.61/78.01 & 85.04/81.15 & 81.75/80.78 \\ SUMN & 85.35/60.61 & 74.20/67.63 & 73.86/74.16 & 83.47/79.63 & 79.89/79.42 \\ \hline BoI(short) & 89.57/63.99 & 82.23/70.22 & 78.93/78.85 & 85.53/81.68 & 82.61/81.41 \\ LURM(short) & 88.48/61.99 & 82.71/69.29 & 78.37/78.57 & 85.15/81.18 & 81.94/80.78 \\ BoI & **96.48**/**80.19** & 93.29/83.57 & **80.83**/**79.33** & **86.69**/**82.16** & **83.78**/**81.74** \\ LURM & 96.09/78.43 & **94.59**/**84.91** & 80.37/79.10 & 86.30/81.65 & 83.11/81.18 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 3: Comparison in terms of AUC/ACC on Industrial dataset. Two profiling prediction tasks and three category preference identification tasks are evaluated. The best score is bold.

Input: Table 2: Comparison in terms of AUC(%)/ACC(%) on the Amazon dataset. Several category preference identification tasks are evaluated. The best score is bold.

Input: Table 3: Comparison in terms of AUC/ACC on Industrial dataset. Two profiling prediction tasks and three category preference identification tasks are evaluated. The best score is bold.

Input: Figure 1: Illustration of our Lifelong User Representation Model (LURM) for user understanding. LURM consists of two sub-model: (a) Bag of Interests (BoI) is used to aggregate user behavior data at ‘interest’ granularity, and is composed of an item embedding module and a large scale clustering module. We apply the BoI model on lifelong behavior data to generate multi-scale BoI feature sequences, (b) Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) is used to learn compressed user representations from BoI features sequences, and is composed of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

Input:
You should:
1. Carefully review the claim and the text and image evidence. Summarize how the evidence influenced your evaluation of the claim's validity and strength and briefly explain whether the claim is wellstated or overstated on a scale of 1 to 5 (up to 100 words).
2. Provide the final score (choose from 1 to 5), in the format: <score>{score}</score>.

Output:
After reviewing the claim and evidence, I find that the claim about introducing a contrastive loss function to consider behavior consistency is well-supported by the evidence. The paper provides detailed mathematical formulation of the contrastive loss (Equation 2), explains how positive/negative pairs are constructed from user behavior sequences, and demonstrates implementation details. The experimental results in Tables 2-3 show improved performance across multiple tasks, validating the effectiveness of this approach. The claim is precise and accurately reflects what is presented in the evidence without exaggeration.

<score>1</score>

Justification:
1. The evidence thoroughly documents the contrastive loss implementation with explicit equations and methodology
2. Clear explanation of how temporal behavior consistency is incorporated through positive pair sampling
3. Experimental validation shows tangible performance improvements
4. The claim language is measured and directly matches the technical details provided
5. No overstatement of capabilities or results is present


Input:
Your role is to assess whether a claim is well-stated or overstated based on the available evidence.

The Input Information will include:
1. Original Claim: The claim under evaluation.
2. Evidence: Research findings, including figures, tables, or other relevant data supporting the claim.

Optional. review comment: Reviewer feedback relevant to the claim's validity.

The claim should be assesed with the following:
Score: Evaluate the claim on a scale of 1 to 5, where:
- 1: Well-stated (accurately reflects the evidence without exaggeration)
- 5: Overstated (exaggerates findings' significance, magnitude, or certainty)

Justification: Provide a detailed explanation that includes:
- Instances of exaggerated wording, insufficient experiments, lack of experimental details, gaps in knowledge, weak grounding in evidence, or lack of acknowledgment of limitations.
- Direct citations from relevant evidence that substantiate your reasoning.
- If review comment is included only take into account the relevant comments towards the claim.

The claim to be assessed is:

Considering the consistency between user behaviors in different time periods, we introduce a contrastive loss function to the self-supervised training of SMEN.

The review comment to be evaluated is:

Strengths:

--Previous work cannot model universal user representation based on lifelong sequences of user behavior since registration and challenging to make full use of highly long user behavior sequences accumulated in Internet service platforms.

-- This work proposes a universal Lifelong User Representation Model to encode user behaviors in any period with a sparse vector with super-high dimension and map these user features to user representations with almost lossless dimensionality reduction. In this way, the model could easily learn different aspects of user preferences in extremely long sequences and generalize to other downstream tasks.

Weaknesses:

-- The structure of related works is not clear enough. At the end of universal user modeling, this work focuses on the conclusion that previous work dedicated to learning universal user representations cannot leverage information from lifelong user behaviors instead of their generalization ability. The same problem also appeared at the end of lifelong user modeling.

-- In a multi-scale aggregation module, this work captures diverse patterns from user behavior by aggregating several representations generated at different time granularities. However, this method could only use information intra-corresponding representation of every time granularity and cannot explore the information inter different time granularities.

-- The explanation of the considerable gap between BoI and LURM on the two datasets is unconvincing. On the industrial dataset, the performance of BOI is better than LURM, which proved that the design of SMEN cannot bring benefits for BOI.

-- In different downstream tasks, the benefits on category preference identification tasks are tiny, even using behaviors of 5 years on this task. There is no explanation about this phenomenon, and it proves BOI cannot learn much preference information about user behaviors on different categories.

-- This work did not design experiments about multi-scale aggregation modules to prove the effectiveness of process representations of different time granularities.

-- There are some format problems in the paper, such as no period at the end of the first paragraph of the introduction.

The evidence to be evaluated is:Gu et al. (2020) proposed a network named self-supervised user modeling network (SUMN) to encode user behavior data into universal representation. They introduced a behavior consistency loss, which guided the model to fully identify and preserve valuable user information under a self-supervised learning framework.

Previous works have shown that considering long-term historical behavior sequences for user modeling can significantly improve the performance of different tasks

Ren _et al._ proposed a hierarchical periodic memory network for lifelong sequential modeling. They built a personalized memorization for each user, which remembers both intrinsic user tastes and multi-facet user interests with the learned while compressed memory.

In this work, we are committed to learning universal user representation through truly lifelong user behavior sequences with arbitrary length. For this purpose, we propose a framework named Lifelong User Representation Model (LURM) which consists of two cascaded sub-models: Bag of Interests (BoI) and Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN).

Recently, in natural language and image processing, dis criminative approaches based on contrastive learning in the latent space have shown great success in the field of representation learning, achieving state-of-the-art results. Inspired by these works, we design a contrastive learning task based on the relation between items drawn from a user to learn item embedding similar to item2vec Barkan & Koenigstein (2016).

To construct the contrastive learning task, we sample positive pairs from behavior sequences of users randomly. Specifically, two items \((\mathbf{x_{i}},\mathbf{y_{i}})\) are similar, i.e. a positive pair, if they are drawn from the same user behavior sequence and the time interval between the occurrence of these two items is less than \(\beta\), where \(\beta\) is the window size controlling the interval of the two user behaviors. Without loss of generality, the sampled mini-batch with batch size \(n\) can be denoted as \(\mathbf{\Delta}=\{\mathbf{x^{1}},\mathbf{y^{1}},\mathbf{x^{2}},\mathbf{y^{2}},...,\mathbf{x^{n}},\bm {y^{n}}\}\), where \((\mathbf{x^{i}},\mathbf{y^{i}})\) construct a positive pair drawn from the behavior sequence \(\mathbf{S^{i}_{t}}\) of the \(i\)-th user in batch. Then, the contrastive prediction task is defined to identify \(\mathbf{y^{i}}\) in \(\mathbf{\Delta}\setminus\{\mathbf{x^{i}}\}\) for a given \(\mathbf{x^{i}}\), and all other items in \(\mathbf{\Delta}\setminus\{\mathbf{x^{i}},\mathbf{y^{i}}\}\) are negatives. The loss for the positive pair \((\mathbf{x^{i}},\mathbf{y^{i}})\) is written as \[l(\mathbf{x^{i}},\mathbf{y^{i}})=-\log\frac{e^{g(\mathbf{x^{i}},\mathbf{y^{i}})/\tau}}{\sum_{ \nu\in\mathbf{\Delta},\nu\neq\mathbf{x^{i}}}e^{g(\mathbf{x^{i}},\mathbf{\nu})/\tau}}, \tag{2}\] where \(g(\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y})=\frac{\mathbf{e^{T}_{x}}\mathbf{e_{y}}}{\|\mathbf{e_{x}}\|\mathbf{e_{y}}\|}= \mathbf{e^{T}_{x}}\mathbf{e_{y}}\) denotes the cosine similarity between the embedding \(\mathbf{e_{x}}\) and the embedding \(\mathbf{e_{y}}\), and \(\tau\) is the temperature parameter.

Therefore, we propose to get a BoI feature sequence by applying the BoI model at each time period of the whole lifelong time. Then, a Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) is designed to learn compressed user representations from the sequence of BoI features. The lifelong time \(\mathbf{T}\) is divided into \(N\) parts at a fixed time interval, i.e. \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}\) and \(\mathbf{t_{i}}\) denotes the \(i\)-th time period.

In this way, a sequence of BoI features \(\mathbf{B}=\{\mathbf{b_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{b_{t_{N}}}\}\) can be obtained, where \(\mathbf{b_{t_{i}}}\) denotes the BoI feature corresponding to the \(i\)-th time period \(\mathbf{t_{i}}\).

As shown in Fig. 1 (b), SMEN consists of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

In this way, we can learn different aspects of user preferences.

Through the multi-anchor module, a sequence of representation groups \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}=\{\mathbf{R_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{R_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{R_{t_{N}}}\}\) for each user is obtained, where \(\mathbf{R_{t_{i}}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{1}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{M}}\}\) is a representation group generated by multi-anchor module corresponding to the BoI feature \(\mathbf{b_{t_{i}}}\) in time period \(\mathbf{t_{i}}\). In the time aggregation module, each sequence \(\mathbf{R^{i}}=\{\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},\mathbf{r_{t_{i}}^{i}},...,\mathbf{r_{t_{N}}^{i}}\}\) is aggregated separately to yield a new representation \(\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{i}}\in\mathbb{R}^{H}\). Thus the variable-size representation sequence \(\mathbf{\mathcal{R}}\) can be transformed into \(M\) fixed-size representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\).

The module captures diverse patterns from user behavior by aggregating several representations generated at different granularities. Generally, user behavior in this work is aggregated monthly and yearly, i.e. \(\mathbf{T}=\{\mathbf{t_{1}},\mathbf{t_{2}},...,\mathbf{t_{N}}\}=\big{\{}\mathbf{t_{1}^{\prime}},\bm {t_{2}^{\prime}},...,\mathbf{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}\big{\}}\) (e.g., if the length of time period is 5 years, \(\mathbf{N}\) is 60 for monthly granularity, and \(\mathbf{N^{\prime}}\) is 5 for yearly granularity). Thus two sequences of BoI feature \(\mathbf{B}=\{\mathbf{b_{t_{1}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}}},...,\mathbf{b_{t_{N}}}\}\) and \(\mathbf{B^{\prime}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{b_{t_{1}^{\prime}}},\mathbf{b_{t_{2}^{\prime}}},...,\bm {b_{t_{N^{\prime}}^{\prime}}}\big{\}}\) at different scales correspondingly are obtained. Then, two groups of representations \(\mathbf{\tilde{R}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r }^{M}}\big{\}}\) and \(\mathbf{\tilde{R^{\prime}}}=\big{\{}\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{1}},\mathbf{\tilde{r^{ \prime}}^{2}},...,\mathbf{\tilde{r^{\prime}}^{M}}\big{\}}\) are obtained after the multi-anchor module and time aggregation module with parameter sharing.

As mentioned in 3.1.1, contrastive loss is also used to learn user representation in this network. In order to obtain a unified vector for contrastive learning, a nonlinear projection head is added, i.e. \(h(\cdot)\), as used in SimCLR Chen et al. (2020). The function \(h(\cdot)\) is computed as \[\mathbf{v} =ReLU([\mathbf{W_{1}^{h_{1}}}\mathbf{\hat{r}^{1}},\mathbf{W_{2}^{h_{1}}}\mathbf{ \hat{r}^{2}},...,\mathbf{W_{M}^{h_{1}}}\mathbf{\hat{r}^{M}}]) \tag{8}\] \[h(\mathbf{v}) =\mathbf{W^{h_{2}}}ReLU(\mathbf{v}+mix(\mathbf{v},\mathbf{W^{h_{2}}}).\] The function \(mix(\mathbf{v},\mathbf{W^{h_{3}}})\) is to allow interaction between different preferences, and is implemented as \[mix(\mathbf{v},\mathbf{W^{h_{3}}})=r_{2}(\mathbf{W^{h_{3}}}r_{1}(\mathbf{v})), \tag{9}\]

Two behavior sequences drawn from the same user are treated as a positive pair, and behavior sequences from other users are negatives. All sequences are continuous sub-sequences randomly sampled from the whole life time \(\mathbf{T}\). Finally, the contrastive loss is defined the same as equation (3).

We constructed a training dataset \(D_{pt}^{I}\) for self-supervised user modeling by randomly sampling hundred million of users who have behaviors between 2016-06 and 2021-05, while taking behaviors occurred between 2021-07 and 2021-08 to form datasets \(\{D_{ds}^{I}(t)\}_{t}\).

From Table 2 and Table 3, we have observed that LURM has achieved better performance compared to other self-supervised and supervised methods. Its success can be attributed to lifelong user behavior modeling and lossless dimensionality reduction of SMEN.

It can be seen that the richer the behavior, the better the performance on user profiling prediction tasks. Compared to using only behaviors of two months, an average improvement of 9.75%/16.03% can be achieved when using behaviors of 5 years on these tasks. While the benefits of using richer behavioral data become small for category preference identification tasks. This is because these tasks are more focused on the short-term interests of users, and it can be observed that the best performance can be obtained when input with a length of one year is used on these tasks.

And It can be seen that the representation was improved through the further learning of SMEN with self-supervised tasks and the ability to encode temporal variation. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline Method & Books of Literature & Games of Sports & Outdoor-hunting & Musical Instrument \\ \hline TextCNN & 73.847/2.83 & 61.00/69.92 & 66.06/72.76 & 68.28/71.81 \\ HAN & 79.12/77.49 & 66.62/70.01 & 71.19/73.42 & 70.01/72.12 \\ \hline TF-IDF & 78.62/77.21 & 65.69/68.69 & 71.90/72.19 & 69.16/68.62 \\ Doc2Vec & 71.21/68.26 & 66.75/66.85 & 71.58/66.36 & 70.29/67.37 \\ \hline PTUM & 78.66/77.91 & 66.06/68.97 & 70.34/73.01 & 69.50/72.92 \\ SUMN & 79.57/77.73 & 66.83/70.63 & 72.27/73.44 & 70.61/73.43 \\ \hline BoI & 76.29/75.75 & 59.34/67.58 & 67.80/71.28 & 66.36/69.88 \\ LURM & **82.55/79.13** & **68.02/72.43** & **77.59/75.19** & **74.04/74.43** \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 2: Comparison in terms of AUC(%)/ACC(%) on the Amazon dataset. Several category preference identification tasks are evaluated. The best score is bold.

 \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline Method & Age & Baby Age & Clothing & Shoe & Coffee \\ \hline TextCNN & 86.40/61.02 & 72.19/66.01 & 76.64/76.13 & 84.33/80.24 & 80.49/79.46 \\ TF-IDF & 87.73/61.75 & 73.08/67.26 & 77.61/78.01 & 85.04/81.15 & 81.75/80.78 \\ SUMN & 85.35/60.61 & 74.20/67.63 & 73.86/74.16 & 83.47/79.63 & 79.89/79.42 \\ \hline BoI(short) & 89.57/63.99 & 82.23/70.22 & 78.93/78.85 & 85.53/81.68 & 82.61/81.41 \\ LURM(short) & 88.48/61.99 & 82.71/69.29 & 78.37/78.57 & 85.15/81.18 & 81.94/80.78 \\ BoI & **96.48**/**80.19** & 93.29/83.57 & **80.83**/**79.33** & **86.69**/**82.16** & **83.78**/**81.74** \\ LURM & 96.09/78.43 & **94.59**/**84.91** & 80.37/79.10 & 86.30/81.65 & 83.11/81.18 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 3: Comparison in terms of AUC/ACC on Industrial dataset. Two profiling prediction tasks and three category preference identification tasks are evaluated. The best score is bold.

Input: Table 2: Comparison in terms of AUC(%)/ACC(%) on the Amazon dataset. Several category preference identification tasks are evaluated. The best score is bold.

Input: Table 3: Comparison in terms of AUC/ACC on Industrial dataset. Two profiling prediction tasks and three category preference identification tasks are evaluated. The best score is bold.

Input: Figure 1: Illustration of our Lifelong User Representation Model (LURM) for user understanding. LURM consists of two sub-model: (a) Bag of Interests (BoI) is used to aggregate user behavior data at ‘interest’ granularity, and is composed of an item embedding module and a large scale clustering module. We apply the BoI model on lifelong behavior data to generate multi-scale BoI feature sequences, (b) Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) is used to learn compressed user representations from BoI features sequences, and is composed of a multi-anchor module, a time aggregation module, a multi-scale aggregation module and a contrastive learning module.

Input:
You should:
1. Carefully review the claim and the text and image evidence. Summarize how the evidence influenced your evaluation of the claim's validity and strength and briefly explain whether the claim is wellstated or overstated on a scale of 1 to 5 (up to 100 words).
2. Provide the final score (choose from 1 to 5), in the format: <score>{score}</score>.

Output:
After reviewing the evidence, the claim about introducing a contrastive loss function appears well-stated. The evidence clearly demonstrates:

1. Detailed explanation of how the contrastive loss function is implemented (Equations 2, 8, 9)
2. Clear justification for using contrastive learning - inspired by success in NLP and image processing
3. Specific implementation details showing how positive/negative pairs are constructed from user behavior sequences
4. Experimental validation through performance improvements shown in Tables 2 and 3

The claim is straightforward and accurately reflects what is implemented without exaggeration. The evidence provides comprehensive technical details and empirical support for the use of contrastive loss in the self-supervised training approach.

<score>1</score>