Benefit from Rich: Tackling Search Interaction Sparsity in Search Enhanced Recommendation

In modern online platforms, search and recommendation (S&R) often coexist, offering opportunities for performance improvement through search-enhanced approaches. Existing studies show that incorporating search signals boosts recommendation performance. However, the effectiveness of these methods relies heavily on rich search interactions. They primarily benefit a small subset of users with abundant search behavior, while offering limited improvements for the majority of users who exhibit only sparse search activity. To address the problem of sparse search data in search-enhanced recommendation, we face two key challenges: (1) how to learn useful search features for users with sparse search interactions, and (2) how to design effective training objectives under sparse conditions. Our idea is to leverage the features of users with rich search interactions to enhance those of users with sparse search interactions. Based on this idea, we propose GSERec, a method that utilizes message passing on the User-Code Graphs to alleviate data sparsity in Search-Enhanced Recommendation. Specifically, we utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) with vector quantization to generate discrete codes, which connect similar users and thereby construct the graph. Through message passing on this graph, embeddings of users with rich search data are propagated to enhance the embeddings of users with sparse interactions. To further ensure that the message passing captures meaningful information from truly similar users, we introduce a contrastive loss to better model user similarities. The enhanced user representations are then integrated into downstream search-enhanced recommendation models. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that GSERec consistently outperforms baselines, especially for users with sparse search behaviors.

Bridging Search and Recommendation through Latent Cross Reasoning

Search and recommendation (S&R) are fundamental components of modern online platforms, yet effectively leveraging search behaviors to improve recommendation remains a challenging problem. User search histories often contain noisy or irrelevant signals that can even degrade recommendation performance, while existing approaches typically encode S&R histories either jointly or separately without explicitly identifying which search behaviors are truly useful. Inspired by the human decision-making process, where one first identifies recommendation intent and then reasons about relevant evidence, we design a latent cross reasoning framework that first encodes user S&R histories to capture global interests and then iteratively reasons over search behaviors to extract signals beneficial for recommendation. Contrastive learning is employed to align latent reasoning states with target items, and reinforcement learning is further introduced to directly optimize ranking performance. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, validating the importance of reasoning in enhancing search-aware recommendation.

Similarity = Value? Consultation Value Assessment and Alignment for Personalized Search

Personalized search systems in e-commerce platforms increasingly involve user interactions with AI assistants, where users consult about products, usage scenarios, and more. Leveraging consultation to personalize search services is trending. Existing methods typically rely on semantic similarity to align historical consultations with current queries due to the absence of 'value' labels, but we observe that semantic similarity alone often fails to capture the true value of consultation for personalization. To address this, we propose a consultation value assessment framework that evaluates historical consultations from three novel perspectives: (1) Scenario Scope Value, (2) Posterior Action Value, and (3) Time Decay Value. Based on this, we introduce VAPS, a value-aware personalized search model that selectively incorporates high-value consultations through a consultation-user action interaction module and an explicit objective that aligns consultations with user actions. Experiments on both public and commercial datasets show that VAPS consistently outperforms baselines in both retrieval and ranking tasks.

Attention Mechanisms Perspective: Exploring LLM Processing of Graph-Structured Data

Attention mechanisms are critical to the success of large language models (LLMs), driving significant advancements in multiple fields. However, for graph-structured data, which requires emphasis on topological connections, they fall short compared to message-passing mechanisms on fixed links, such as those employed by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). This raises a question: ``Does attention fail for graphs in natural language settings?'' Motivated by these observations, we embarked on an empirical study from the perspective of attention mechanisms to explore how LLMs process graph-structured data. The goal is to gain deeper insights into the attention behavior of LLMs over graph structures. We uncovered unique phenomena regarding how LLMs apply attention to graph-structured data and analyzed these findings to improve the modeling of such data by LLMs. The primary findings of our research are: 1) While LLMs can recognize graph data and capture text-node interactions, they struggle to model inter-node relationships within graph structures due to inherent architectural constraints. 2) The attention distribution of LLMs across graph nodes does not align with ideal structural patterns, indicating a failure to adapt to graph topology nuances. 3) Neither fully connected attention nor fixed connectivity is optimal; each has specific limitations in its application scenarios. Instead, intermediate-state attention windows improve LLM training performance and seamlessly transition to fully connected windows during inference. Source code: \href{https://github.com/millioniron/LLM_exploration}{LLM4Exploration}

The Dance of Atoms-De Novo Protein Design with Diffusion Model

The de novo design of proteins refers to creating proteins with specific structures and functions that do not naturally exist. In recent years, the accumulation of high-quality protein structure and sequence data and technological advancements have paved the way for the successful application of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models in protein design. These models have surpassed traditional approaches that rely on fragments and bioinformatics. They have significantly enhanced the success rate of de novo protein design, and reduced experimental costs, leading to breakthroughs in the field. Among various generative AI models, diffusion models have yielded the most promising results in protein design. In the past two to three years, more than ten protein design models based on diffusion models have emerged. Among them, the representative model, RFDiffusion, has demonstrated success rates in 25 protein design tasks that far exceed those of traditional methods, and other AI-based approaches like RFjoint and hallucination. This review will systematically examine the application of diffusion models in generating protein backbones and sequences. We will explore the strengths and limitations of different models, summarize successful cases of protein design using diffusion models, and discuss future development directions.

Decoding Recommendation Behaviors of In-Context Learning LLMs Through Gradient Descent

Recently, there has been a growing trend in utilizing large language models (LLMs) for recommender systems, referred to as LLMRec. A notable approach within this trend is not to fine-tune these models directly but instead to leverage In-Context Learning (ICL) methods tailored for LLMRec, denoted as LLM-ICL Rec. Many contemporary techniques focus on harnessing ICL content to enhance LLMRec performance. However, optimizing LLMRec with ICL content presents unresolved challenges. Specifically, two key issues stand out: (1) the limited understanding of why using a few demonstrations without model fine-tuning can lead to better performance compared to zero-shot recommendations. (2) the lack of evaluation metrics for demonstrations in LLM-ICL Rec and the absence of the theoretical analysis and practical design for optimizing the generation of ICL content for recommendation contexts. To address these two main issues, we propose a theoretical model, the LLM-ICL Recommendation Equivalent Gradient Descent model (LRGD) in this paper, which connects recommendation generation with gradient descent dynamics. We demonstrate that the ICL inference process in LLM aligns with the training procedure of its dual model, producing token predictions equivalent to the dual model's testing outputs. Building on these theoretical insights, we propose an evaluation metric for assessing demonstration quality. We integrate perturbations and regularizations in LRGD to enhance the robustness of the recommender system. To further improve demonstration effectiveness, prevent performance collapse, and ensure long-term adaptability, we also propose a two-stage optimization process in practice. Extensive experiments and detailed analysis on three Amazon datasets validate the theoretical equivalence and support the effectiveness of our theoretical analysis and practical module design.

MAPS: Motivation-Aware Personalized Search via LLM-Driven Consultation Alignment

Personalized product search aims to retrieve and rank items that match users' preferences and search intent. Despite their effectiveness, existing approaches typically assume that users' query fully captures their real motivation. However, our analysis of a real-world e-commerce platform reveals that users often engage in relevant consultations before searching, indicating they refine intents through consultations based on motivation and need. The implied motivation in consultations is a key enhancing factor for personalized search. This unexplored area comes with new challenges including aligning contextual motivations with concise queries, bridging the category-text gap, and filtering noise within sequence history. To address these, we propose a Motivation-Aware Personalized Search (MAPS) method. It embeds queries and consultations into a unified semantic space via LLMs, utilizes a Mixture of Attention Experts (MoAE) to prioritize critical semantics, and introduces dual alignment: (1) contrastive learning aligns consultations, reviews, and product features; (2) bidirectional attention integrates motivation-aware embeddings with user preferences. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data show MAPS outperforms existing methods in both retrieval and ranking tasks.

Towards Heisenberg limit without critical slowing down via quantum reinforcement learning

Critical ground states of quantum many-body systems have emerged as vital resources for quantum-enhanced sensing. Traditional methods to prepare these states often rely on adiabatic evolution, which may diminish the quantum sensing advantage. In this work, we propose a quantum reinforcement learning (QRL)-enhanced critical sensing protocol for quantum many-body systems with exotic phase diagrams. Starting from product states and utilizing QRL-discovered gate sequences, we explore sensing accuracy in the presence of unknown external magnetic fields, covering both local and global regimes. Our results demonstrate that QRL-learned sequences reach the finite quantum speed limit and generalize effectively across systems of arbitrary size, ensuring accuracy regardless of preparation time. This method can robustly achieve Heisenberg and super-Heisenberg limits, even in noisy environments with practical Pauli measurements. Our study highlights the efficacy of QRL in enabling precise quantum state preparation, thereby advancing scalable, high-accuracy quantum critical sensing.

Instruct-of-Reflection: Enhancing Large Language Models Iterative Reflection Capabilities via Dynamic-Meta Instruction

Self-reflection for Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained significant attention. Existing approaches involve models iterating and improving their previous responses based on LLMs' internal reflection ability or external feedback. However, recent research has raised doubts about whether intrinsic self-correction without external feedback may even degrade performance. Based on our empirical evidence, we find that current static reflection methods may lead to redundant, drift, and stubborn issues. To mitigate this, we introduce Instruct-of-Reflection (IoRT), a novel and general reflection framework that leverages dynamic-meta instruction to enhance the iterative reflection capability of LLMs. Specifically, we propose the instructor driven by the meta-thoughts and self-consistency classifier, generates various instructions, including refresh, stop, and select, to guide the next reflection iteration. Our experiments demonstrate that IoRT achieves an average improvement of 10.1% over established baselines in mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks, highlighting its efficacy and applicability.

LinRec: Linear Attention Mechanism for Long-term Sequential Recommender Systems

Transformer models have achieved remarkable success in sequential recommender systems (SRSs). However, computing the attention matrix in traditional dot-product attention mechanisms results in a quadratic complexity with sequence lengths, leading to high computational costs for long-term sequential recommendation. Motivated by the above observation, we propose a novel L2-Normalized Linear Attention for the Transformer-based Sequential Recommender Systems (LinRec), which theoretically improves efficiency while preserving the learning capabilities of the traditional dot-product attention. Specifically, by thoroughly examining the equivalence conditions of efficient attention mechanisms, we show that LinRec possesses linear complexity while preserving the property of attention mechanisms. In addition, we reveal its latent efficiency properties by interpreting the proposed LinRec mechanism through a statistical lens. Extensive experiments are conducted based on two public benchmark datasets, demonstrating that the combination of LinRec and Transformer models achieves comparable or even superior performance than state-of-the-art Transformer-based SRS models while significantly improving time and memory efficiency.