Abstract: Systems and methods are disclosed for dynamically smoothing images based on network conditions to adjust a bitrate needed to transmit the images. Content in the images is smoothed to reduce the quantity of bits needed to encode each image. Filtering the images modifies regions including content having a high frequency of pixel variation, reducing the frequency, so the pixel colors in the region appear “smoothed” or homogeneous. In other words, a region of an image showing a grassy lawn has a high frequency of variation from pixel to pixel resulting from the fine detail of separate blades of grass that may be similar in color, but not homogeneous. Encoding the region as a single shade of green (or multi-pixel regions of different shades of green) enables a viewer to recognize it as a grassy lawn while greatly reducing the number of bits needed to represent the region.

Abstract: This disclosure relates generally to method and system for handling popularity bias in item recommendations. In an embodiment the method includes initializing an item embedding look-up matrix corresponding to items in a sequence of item-clicks with respect to a training data. L2 norm is applied to the item embedding look-up matrix to learn a normalized item embeddings. Using a neural network, a session embeddings corresponding to the sequences of item-clicks is modeled and L2 norm is applied to the session embeddings to obtain a normalized session embeddings. Relevance scores corresponding to each of the plurality of items arc obtained based on similarity between the normalized item embeddings and the normalized session embeddings. A multi-dimensional probability vector corresponding to the relevance scores for the items to be clicked in the sequence is obtained. A list of the items ordered based on the multi-dimensional probability vector is provided as recommendation.

Abstract: Session-based Recommendation (SR) is the task of recommending the next item based on previously recorded user interactions. However, most existing approaches for SR either rely on costly online interactions with real users (model-free approaches) or rely on potentially biased rule-based or data-driven user-behavior models (model-based approaches) for learning. This disclosure relates to a system and method for selecting session-based recommendation policies using historical recommendations and user feedback. Herein, the learning of recommendation policies given offline or batch data from old recommendation policies based on a Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based recommender system in the offline or batch-constrained setting without requiring access to a user-behavior model or real-interactions with the users.

Abstract: Systems and methods are disclosed for dynamically smoothing images based on network conditions to adjust a bitrate needed to transmit the images. Content in the images is smoothed to reduce the quantity of bits needed to encode each image. Filtering the images modifies regions including content having a high frequency of pixel variation, reducing the frequency, so the pixel colors in the region appear “smoothed” or homogeneous. In other words, a region of an image showing a grassy lawn has a high frequency of variation from pixel to pixel resulting from the fine detail of separate blades of grass that may be similar in color, but not homogeneous. Encoding the region as a single shade of green (or multi-pixel regions of different shades of green) enables a viewer to recognize it as a grassy lawn while greatly reducing the number of bits needed to represent the region.