RecGaze: The First Eye Tracking and User Interaction Dataset for Carousel Interfaces

Carousel interfaces are widely used in e-commerce and streaming services, but little research has been devoted to them. Previous studies of interfaces for presenting search and recommendation results have focused on single ranked lists, but it appears their results cannot be extrapolated to carousels due to the added complexity. Eye tracking is a highly informative approach to understanding how users click, yet there are no eye tracking studies concerning carousels. There are very few interaction datasets on recommenders with carousel interfaces and none that contain gaze data. We introduce the RecGaze dataset: the first comprehensive feedback dataset on carousels that includes eye tracking results, clicks, cursor movements, and selection explanations. The dataset comprises of interactions from 3 movie selection tasks with 40 different carousel interfaces per user. In total, 87 users and 3,477 interactions are logged. In addition to the dataset, its description and possible use cases, we provide results of a survey on carousel design and the first analysis of gaze data on carousels, which reveals a golden triangle or F-pattern browsing behavior. Our work seeks to advance the field of carousel interfaces by providing the first dataset with eye tracking results on carousels. In this manner, we provide and encourage an empirical understanding of interactions with carousel interfaces, for building better recommender systems through gaze information, and also encourage the development of gaze-based recommenders.

Towards Agentic Recommender Systems in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of agentic AI systems that extend beyond the capabilities of standalone models. By empowering LLMs to perceive external environments, integrate multimodal information, and interact with various tools, these agentic systems exhibit greater autonomy and adaptability across complex tasks. This evolution brings new opportunities to recommender systems (RS): LLM-based Agentic RS (LLM-ARS) can offer more interactive, context-aware, and proactive recommendations, potentially reshaping the user experience and broadening the application scope of RS. Despite promising early results, fundamental challenges remain, including how to effectively incorporate external knowledge, balance autonomy with controllability, and evaluate performance in dynamic, multimodal settings. In this perspective paper, we first present a systematic analysis of LLM-ARS: (1) clarifying core concepts and architectures; (2) highlighting how agentic capabilities -- such as planning, memory, and multimodal reasoning -- can enhance recommendation quality; and (3) outlining key research questions in areas such as safety, efficiency, and lifelong personalization. We also discuss open problems and future directions, arguing that LLM-ARS will drive the next wave of RS innovation. Ultimately, we foresee a paradigm shift toward intelligent, autonomous, and collaborative recommendation experiences that more closely align with users' evolving needs and complex decision-making processes.

An Efficient Plugin Method for Metric Optimization of Black-Box Models

Many machine learning algorithms and classifiers are available only via API queries as a ``black-box'' -- that is, the downstream user has no ability to change, re-train, or fine-tune the model on a particular target distribution. Indeed, the downstream user may not even have knowledge of the \emph{original} training distribution or performance metric used to construct and optimize the black-box model. We propose a simple and efficient method, Plugin, which \emph{post-processes} arbitrary multiclass predictions from any black-box classifier in order to simultaneously (1) adapt these predictions to a target distribution; and (2) optimize a particular metric of the confusion matrix. Importantly, Plugin is a completely \textit{post-hoc} method which does not rely on feature information, only requires a small amount of probabilistic predictions along with their corresponding true label, and optimizes metrics by querying. We empirically demonstrate that Plugin is both broadly applicable and has performance competitive with related methods on a variety of tabular and language tasks.

Active Learning for Direct Preference Optimization

Direct preference optimization (DPO) is a form of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) where the policy is learned directly from preferential feedback. Although many models of human preferences exist, the critical task of selecting the most informative feedback for training them is under-explored. We propose an active learning framework for DPO, which can be applied to collect human feedback online or to choose the most informative subset of already collected feedback offline. We propose efficient algorithms for both settings. The key idea is to linearize the DPO objective at the last layer of the neural network representation of the optimized policy and then compute the D-optimal design to collect preferential feedback. We prove that the errors in our DPO logit estimates diminish with more feedback. We show the effectiveness of our algorithms empirically in the setting that matches our theory and also on large language models.

From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning

Active Learning (AL) has been a powerful paradigm for improving model efficiency and performance by selecting the most informative data points for labeling and training. In recent active learning frameworks, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been employed not only for selection but also for generating entirely new data instances and providing more cost-effective annotations. Motivated by the increasing importance of high-quality data and efficient model training in the era of LLMs, we present a comprehensive survey on LLM-based Active Learning. We introduce an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes these techniques and discuss the transformative roles LLMs can play in the active learning loop. We further examine the impact of AL on LLM learning paradigms and its applications across various domains. Finally, we identify open challenges and propose future research directions. This survey aims to serve as an up-to-date resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to gain an intuitive understanding of LLM-based AL techniques and deploy them to new applications.

Comparing Few to Rank Many: Active Human Preference Learning using Randomized Frank-Wolfe

We study learning of human preferences from a limited comparison feedback. This task is ubiquitous in machine learning. Its applications such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, have been transformational. We formulate this problem as learning a Plackett-Luce model over a universe of $N$ choices from $K$-way comparison feedback, where typically $K \ll N$. Our solution is the D-optimal design for the Plackett-Luce objective. The design defines a data logging policy that elicits comparison feedback for a small collection of optimally chosen points from all ${N \choose K}$ feasible subsets. The main algorithmic challenge in this work is that even fast methods for solving D-optimal designs would have $O({N \choose K})$ time complexity. To address this issue, we propose a randomized Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithm that solves the linear maximization sub-problems in the FW method on randomly chosen variables. We analyze the algorithm, and evaluate it empirically on synthetic and open-source NLP datasets.

GUI Agents: A Survey

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents, powered by Large Foundation Models, have emerged as a transformative approach to automating human-computer interaction. These agents autonomously interact with digital systems or software applications via GUIs, emulating human actions such as clicking, typing, and navigating visual elements across diverse platforms. Motivated by the growing interest and fundamental importance of GUI agents, we provide a comprehensive survey that categorizes their benchmarks, evaluation metrics, architectures, and training methods. We propose a unified framework that delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. Furthermore, we identify important open challenges and discuss key future directions. Finally, this work serves as a basis for practitioners and researchers to gain an intuitive understanding of current progress, techniques, benchmarks, and critical open problems that remain to be addressed.

Multi-Objective Alignment of Large Language Models Through Hypervolume Maximization

Multi-objective alignment from human feedback (MOAHF) in large language models (LLMs) is a challenging problem as human preferences are complex, multifaceted, and often conflicting. Recent works on MOAHF considered a-priori multi-objective optimization (MOO), where human preferences are known at training or inference time. In contrast, when human preferences are unknown or difficult to quantify, a natural approach is to cover the Pareto front by multiple diverse solutions. We propose an algorithm HaM for learning diverse LLM policies that maximizes their hypervolume. This is the first application of a-posteriori MOO to MOAHF. HaM is computationally and space efficient, and empirically superior across objectives such as harmlessness, helpfulness, humor, faithfulness, and hallucination, on various datasets.

Language-Model Prior Overcomes Cold-Start Items

The growth of recommender systems (RecSys) is driven by digitization and the need for personalized content in areas such as e-commerce and video streaming. The content in these systems often changes rapidly and therefore they constantly face the ongoing cold-start problem, where new items lack interaction data and are hard to value. Existing solutions for the cold-start problem, such as content-based recommenders and hybrid methods, leverage item metadata to determine item similarities. The main challenge with these methods is their reliance on structured and informative metadata to capture detailed item similarities, which may not always be available. This paper introduces a novel approach for cold-start item recommendation that utilizes the language model (LM) to estimate item similarities, which are further integrated as a Bayesian prior with classic recommender systems. This approach is generic and able to boost the performance of various recommenders. Specifically, our experiments integrate it with both sequential and collaborative filtering-based recommender and evaluate it on two real-world datasets, demonstrating the enhanced performance of the proposed approach.

OCEAN: Offline Chain-of-thought Evaluation and Alignment in Large Language Models

Offline evaluation of LLMs is crucial in understanding their capacities, though current methods remain underexplored in existing research. In this work, we focus on the offline evaluation of the chain-of-thought capabilities and show how to optimize LLMs based on the proposed evaluation method. To enable offline feedback with rich knowledge and reasoning paths, we use knowledge graphs (e.g., Wikidata5m) to provide feedback on the generated chain of thoughts. Due to the heterogeneity between LLM reasoning and KG structures, direct interaction and feedback from KGs on LLM behavior are challenging, as they require accurate entity linking and grounding of LLM-generated chains of thought in the KG. To address the above challenge, we propose an offline chain-of-thought evaluation framework, OCEAN, which models chain-of-thought reasoning in LLMs as an MDP and evaluate the policy's alignment with KG preference modeling. To overcome the reasoning heterogeneity and grounding problems, we leverage on-policy KG exploration and RL to model a KG policy that generates token-level likelihood distributions for LLM-generated chain-of-thought reasoning paths, simulating KG reasoning preference. Then we incorporate the knowledge-graph feedback on the validity and alignment of the generated reasoning paths into inverse propensity scores and propose KG-IPS estimator. Theoretically, we prove the unbiasedness of the proposed KG-IPS estimator and provide a lower bound on its variance. With the off-policy evaluated value function, we can directly enable off-policy optimization to further enhance chain-of-thought alignment. Our empirical study shows that OCEAN can be efficiently optimized for generating chain-of-thought reasoning paths with higher estimated values without affecting LLMs' general abilities in downstream tasks or their internal knowledge.