Abstract:Recommender systems have become integral to navigating the modern digital ecosystem. Yet most deployed systems remain confined within single-platform boundaries, observing localized interaction traces and ranking items from isolated candidate spaces. This design is poorly suited to real-world tasks that unfold through searches, content consumption, and comparisons across multiple information sources. Claw-style personal agents, with persistent access to authorized cross-platform context, create an opportunity for recommendation to operate around the user rather than any single platform. In this paper, we introduce Claw-native recommender systems, a new paradigm that moves beyond platform-local ranking to produce unified, complementary recommendation slates spanning diverse sources and content forms. To instantiate this paradigm, we present ClawRec, the first recommender system designed to operate natively in this environment. ClawRec maintains an evidence-linked, temporally structured user state that connects cross-platform behaviors with cross-source recommendations. It organizes retrieval around functional source roles and selects candidates according to their marginal utility, producing non-redundant slates aligned with the user's active task. To enable rigorous evaluation, we introduce ClawRec-SimBench, a benchmark constructed from sequences of concrete life events and cross-platform behavior trajectories. Experiments show that ClawRec outperforms the strongest baselines, achieving an NDCG@20 of 0.6134 (+0.1126) and a Hit@20 of 0.6944 (+0.0854), while also improving user state quality and temporal alignment. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ClawRec.
Abstract:Click-through rate (CTR) prediction holds a pivotal role in online advertising and recommendation systems, where even small improvements can significantly boost revenue. Existing research primarily focuses on designing dual-stream architectures to capture effective complex feature interactions from both explicit and implicit perspectives. However, these approaches are faced with two major challenges: 1) the high complexity of feature interaction learning, which increases computational demands and the overfitting risk, and 2) the imbalance between explicit and implicit modules, where one module's output may dominate the final prediction. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose Dual-Stream MLP (DS-MLP), a novel feature interaction framework for the CTR prediction task. Specially, it leverages knowledge distillation to consolidate the capacity of learning explicit feature interaction into a main MLP network, while a parallel MLP simultaneously captures implicit feature interactions as a complement. To effectively optimize the dual-stream MLP architecture, we further design a specific learning approach with two alignment strategies for enhancing the compatibility of the two MLP components. Experiments demonstrate that DS-MLP, though merely a vanilla MLP structure (the final model), can achieve state-of-the-art performance across three widely used benchmarks, offering a scalable and efficient solution for large-scale recommendation systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/DS-MLP.
Abstract:The technical foundations of recommender systems have progressed from collaborative filtering to complex neural models and, more recently, large language models. Despite these technological advances, deployed systems often underserve their users by simply presenting a list of items, leaving the burden of exploration, comparison, and synthesis entirely on the user. This paper argues that this traditional "tool-based" paradigm fundamentally limits user experience, as the system acts as a passive filter rather than an active assistant. To address this limitation, we propose a novel deep research paradigm for recommendation, which replaces conventional item lists with comprehensive, user-centric reports. We instantiate this paradigm through RecPilot, a multi-agent framework comprising two core components: a user trajectory simulation agent that autonomously explores the item space, and a self-evolving report generation agent that synthesizes the findings into a coherent, interpretable report tailored to support user decisions. This approach reframes recommendation as a proactive, agent-driven service. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that RecPilot not only achieves strong performance in modeling user behaviors but also generates highly persuasive reports that substantially reduce user effort in item evaluation, validating the potential of this new interaction paradigm.
Abstract:Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays a pivotal role in online advertising and recommender systems. Despite notable progress in modeling user preferences from historical behaviors, two key challenges persist. First, exsiting discriminative paradigms focus on matching candidates to user history, often overfitting to historically dominant features and failing to adapt to rapid interest shifts. Second, a critical information chasm emerges from the point-wise ranking paradigm. By scoring each candidate in isolation, CTR models discard the rich contextual signal implied by the recalled set as a whole, leading to a misalignment where long-term preferences often override the user's immediate, evolving intent. To address these issues, we propose GenCI, a generative user intent framework that leverages semantic interest cohorts to model dynamic user preferences for CTR prediction. The framework first employs a generative model, trained with a next-item prediction (NTP) objective, to proactively produce candidate interest cohorts. These cohorts serve as explicit, candidate-agnostic representations of a user's immediate intent. A hierarchical candidate-aware network then injects this rich contextual signal into the ranking stage, refining them with cross-attention to align with both user history and the target item. The entire model is trained end-to-end, creating a more aligned and effective CTR prediction pipeline. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.