NextAds: Towards Next-generation Personalized Video Advertising

With the rapid growth of online video consumption, video advertising has become increasingly dominant in the digital advertising landscape. Yet diverse users and viewing contexts makes one-size-fits-all ad creatives insufficient for consistent effectiveness, underlining the importance of personalization. In practice, most personalized video advertising systems follow a retrieval-based paradigm, selecting the optimal one from a small set of professionally pre-produced creatives for each user. Such static and finite inventories limits both the granularity and the timeliness of personalization, and prevents the creatives from being continuously refined based on online user feedback. Recent advances in generative AI make it possible to move beyond retrieval toward optimizing video creatives in a continuous space at serving time. In this light, we propose NextAds, a generation-based paradigm for next-generation personalized video advertising, and conceptualize NextAds with four core components. To enable comparable research progress, we formulate two representative tasks: personalized creative generation and personalized creative integration, and introduce corresponding lightweight benchmarks. To assess feasibility, we instantiate end-to-end pipelines for both tasks and conduct initial exploratory experiments, demonstrating that GenAI can generate and integrate personalized creatives with encouraging performance. Moreover, we discuss the key challenges and opportunities under this paradigm, aiming to provide actionable insights for both researchers and practitioners and to catalyze progress in personalized video advertising.

Uncertainty-aware Generative Recommendation

Generative Recommendation has emerged as a transformative paradigm, reformulating recommendation as an end-to-end autoregressive sequence generation task. Despite its promise, existing preference optimization methods typically rely on binary outcome correctness, suffering from a systemic limitation we term uncertainty blindness. This issue manifests in the neglect of the model's intrinsic generation confidence, the variation in sample learning difficulty, and the lack of explicit confidence expression, directly leading to unstable training dynamics and unquantifiable decision risks. In this paper, we propose Uncertainty-aware Generative Recommendation (UGR), a unified framework that leverages uncertainty as a critical signal for adaptive optimization. UGR synergizes three mechanisms: (1) an uncertainty-weighted reward to penalize confident errors; (2) difficulty-aware optimization dynamics to prevent premature convergence; and (3) explicit confidence alignment to empower the model with confidence expression capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UGR not only yields superior recommendation performance but also fundamentally stabilizes training, preventing the performance degradation often observed in standard methods. Furthermore, the learned confidence enables reliable downstream risk-aware applications.

Bringing Reasoning to Generative Recommendation Through the Lens of Cascaded Ranking

Generative Recommendation (GR) has become a promising end-to-end approach with high FLOPS utilization for resource-efficient recommendation. Despite the effectiveness, we show that current GR models suffer from a critical \textbf{bias amplification} issue, where token-level bias escalates as token generation progresses, ultimately limiting the recommendation diversity and hurting the user experience. By comparing against the key factor behind the success of traditional multi-stage pipelines, we reveal two limitations in GR that can amplify the bias: homogeneous reliance on the encoded history, and fixed computational budgets that prevent deeper user preference understanding. To combat the bias amplification issue, it is crucial for GR to 1) incorporate more heterogeneous information, and 2) allocate greater computational resources at each token generation step. To this end, we propose CARE, a simple yet effective cascaded reasoning framework for debiased GR. To incorporate heterogeneous information, we introduce a progressive history encoding mechanism, which progressively incorporates increasingly fine-grained history information as the generation process advances. To allocate more computations, we propose a query-anchored reasoning mechanism, which seeks to perform a deeper understanding of historical information through parallel reasoning steps. We instantiate CARE on three GR backbones. Empirical results on four datasets show the superiority of CARE in recommendation accuracy, diversity, efficiency, and promising scalability. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/Linxyhaha/CARE.

Towards Sample-Efficient and Stable Reinforcement Learning for LLM-based Recommendation

While Long Chain-of-Thought (Long CoT) reasoning has shown promise in Large Language Models (LLMs), its adoption for enhancing recommendation quality is growing rapidly. In this work, we critically examine this trend and argue that Long CoT is inherently ill-suited for the sequential recommendation domain. We attribute this misalignment to two primary factors: excessive inference latency and the lack of explicit cognitive reasoning patterns in user behavioral data. Driven by these observations, we propose pivoting away from the CoT structure to directly leverage its underlying mechanism: Reinforcement Learning (RL), to explore the item space. However, applying RL directly faces significant obstacles, notably low sample efficiency-where most actions fail to provide learning signals-and training instability. To overcome these limitations, we propose RISER, a novel Reinforced Item Space Exploration framework for Recommendation. RISER is designed to transform non-learnable trajectories into effective pairwise preference data for optimization. Furthermore, it incorporates specific strategies to ensure stability, including the prevention of redundant rollouts and the constraint of token-level update magnitudes. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that RISER significantly outperforms competitive baselines, establishing a robust paradigm for RL-enhanced LLM recommendation. Our code will be available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RISER/.

One Adapts to Any: Meta Reward Modeling for Personalized LLM Alignment

Alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) aims to align outputs with human preferences, and personalized alignment further adapts models to individual users. This relies on personalized reward models that capture user-specific preferences and automatically provide individualized feedback. However, developing these models faces two critical challenges: the scarcity of feedback from individual users and the need for efficient adaptation to unseen users. We argue that addressing these constraints requires a paradigm shift from fitting data to learn user preferences to learn the process of preference adaptation. To realize this, we propose Meta Reward Modeling (MRM), which reformulates personalized reward modeling as a meta-learning problem. Specifically, we represent each user's reward model as a weighted combination of base reward functions, and optimize the initialization of these weights using a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML)-style framework to support fast adaptation under limited feedback. To ensure robustness, we introduce the Robust Personalization Objective (RPO), which places greater emphasis on hard-to-learn users during meta optimization. Extensive experiments on personalized preference datasets validate that MRM enhances few-shot personalization, improves user robustness, and consistently outperforms baselines.

Don't Start Over: A Cost-Effective Framework for Migrating Personalized Prompts Between LLMs

Personalization in Large Language Models (LLMs) often relies on user-specific soft prompts. However, these prompts become obsolete when the foundation model is upgraded, necessitating costly, full-scale retraining. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Prompt-level User Migration Adapter (PUMA), a lightweight framework to efficiently migrate personalized prompts across incompatible models. PUMA utilizes a parameter-efficient adapter to bridge the semantic gap, combined with a group-based user selection strategy to significantly reduce training costs. Experiments on three large-scale datasets show our method matches or even surpasses the performance of retraining from scratch, reducing computational cost by up to 98%. The framework demonstrates strong generalization across diverse model architectures and robustness in advanced scenarios like chained and aggregated migrations, offering a practical path for the sustainable evolution of personalized AI by decoupling user assets from the underlying models.

PERM: Psychology-grounded Empathetic Reward Modeling for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in human-centric applications, yet they often fail to provide substantive emotional support. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been utilized to enhance empathy of LLMs, existing reward models typically evaluate empathy from a single perspective, overlooking the inherently bidirectional interaction nature of empathy between the supporter and seeker as defined by Empathy Cycle theory. To address this limitation, we propose Psychology-grounded Empathetic Reward Modeling (PERM). PERM operationalizes empathy evaluation through a bidirectional decomposition: 1) Supporter perspective, assessing internal resonation and communicative expression; 2) Seeker perspective, evaluating emotional reception. Additionally, it incorporates a bystander perspective to monitor overall interaction quality. Extensive experiments on a widely-used emotional intelligence benchmark and an industrial daily conversation dataset demonstrate that PERM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 10\%. Furthermore, a blinded user study reveals a 70\% preference for our approach, highlighting its efficacy in generating more empathetic responses. Our code, dataset, and models are available at https://github.com/ZhengWwwq/PERM.

Controllable LLM Reasoning via Sparse Autoencoder-Based Steering

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit human-like cognitive reasoning strategies (e.g. backtracking, cross-verification) during reasoning process, which improves their performance on complex tasks. Currently, reasoning strategies are autonomously selected by LRMs themselves. However, such autonomous selection often produces inefficient or even erroneous reasoning paths. To make reasoning more reliable and flexible, it is important to develop methods for controlling reasoning strategies. Existing methods struggle to control fine-grained reasoning strategies due to conceptual entanglement in LRMs' hidden states. To address this, we leverage Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to decompose strategy-entangled hidden states into a disentangled feature space. To identify the few strategy-specific features from the vast pool of SAE features, we propose SAE-Steering, an efficient two-stage feature identification pipeline. SAE-Steering first recalls features that amplify the logits of strategy-specific keywords, filtering out over 99\% of features, and then ranks the remaining features by their control effectiveness. Using the identified strategy-specific features as control vectors, SAE-Steering outperforms existing methods by over 15\% in control effectiveness. Furthermore, controlling reasoning strategies can redirect LRMs from erroneous paths to correct ones, achieving a 7\% absolute accuracy improvement.

AutoForge: Automated Environment Synthesis for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Conducting reinforcement learning (RL) in simulated environments offers a cost-effective and highly scalable way to enhance language-based agents. However, previous work has been limited to semi-automated environment synthesis or tasks lacking sufficient difficulty, offering little breadth or depth. In addition, the instability of simulated users integrated into these environments, along with the heterogeneity across simulated environments, poses further challenges for agentic RL. In this work, we propose: (1) a unified pipeline for automated and scalable synthesis of simulated environments associated with high-difficulty but easily verifiable tasks; and (2) an environment level RL algorithm that not only effectively mitigates user instability but also performs advantage estimation at the environment level, thereby improving training efficiency and stability. Comprehensive evaluations on agentic benchmarks, including tau-bench, tau2-Bench, and VitaBench, validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Further in-depth analyses underscore its out-of-domain generalization.

RL-MTJail: Reinforcement Learning for Automated Black-Box Multi-Turn Jailbreaking of Large Language Models

Large language models are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, threatening their safe deployment in real-world applications. This paper studies black-box multi-turn jailbreaks, aiming to train attacker LLMs to elicit harmful content from black-box models through a sequence of prompt-output interactions. Existing approaches typically rely on single turn optimization, which is insufficient for learning long-term attack strategies. To bridge this gap, we formulate the problem as a multi-turn reinforcement learning task, directly optimizing the harmfulness of the final-turn output as the outcome reward. To mitigate sparse supervision and promote long-term attack strategies, we propose two heuristic process rewards: (1) controlling the harmfulness of intermediate outputs to prevent triggering the black-box model's rejection mechanisms, and (2) maintaining the semantic relevance of intermediate outputs to avoid drifting into irrelevant content. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks show consistently improved attack success rates across multiple models, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/xxiqiao/RL-MTJail. Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful content.