GIFT: LLM-Guided State-Reward Interface for Financial Reinforcement Learning

Financial portfolio trading is naturally formulated as a reinforcement learning problem, where an agent sequentially rebalances assets under changing market conditions to balance return, risk, and transaction costs. Yet in non-stationary markets, raw OHLCV states and short-horizon return rewards often provide an under-specified learning interface, motivating large language models as a way to inject financial knowledge into state and reward design while constraining open-ended generation. To this end, we propose GIFT, an LLM-guided framework for state-reward interface design in PPO-based financial reinforcement learning. Rather than using the LLM to make trading decisions, GIFT uses Factor-guided State Enhancement to generate state features from financial-factor primitives, Risk-rule-guided Reward Shaping to generate auxiliary rewards from portfolio-risk rules, and Diagnostic-guided Refinement to revise candidate interfaces using PPO rollout diagnostics. After refinement, GIFT fixes the selected state-reward interface before evaluation, with no further LLM queries or interface updates at test time. Comprehensive rolling-window experiments across diverse market regimes and portfolio scenarios demonstrate that GIFT improves learning-signal quality and out-of-sample risk-adjusted portfolio performance over baselines. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/KAG778/GIFT .

Latent Reward Steering: An Adaptive Inference-Time Framework that Implicitly Promotes Cognitive Behaviors in Reasoning LLMs

Strong reasoning depends not only on model knowledge but also on how effectively cognitive behaviors are deployed during generation. Existing methods often rely on explicit behavior-level control, making them insufficiently adaptive when failures and required corrections vary across reasoning states, tasks, and models. To this end, we propose Latent Reward Steering (LRS), an adaptive inference-time framework that promotes cognitive behaviors by optimizing the sparse-autoencoder (SAE) latent states that implicitly carry them. Rather than relying on predefined cognitive behaviors or steering directions derived from them, LRS trains a latent reward model on reasoning traces by final answer correctness to estimate the quality of intermediate latent states. During inference, reward gradients provide state-specific correction directions for fragile latent states, while a reward and confidence gate restricts intervention to states the reward signal flags as fragile. Experiments on multiple reasoning LLM backbones and benchmarks show that \ours consistently improves performance over various baselines, and post-hoc analyses further indicate that \ours implicitly promotes good cognitive behaviors that fix the original reasoning errors. Code is available at: https://github.com/jiakanglee/Latent-Reward-Steering.

On the Role of Language Representations in Auto-Bidding: Findings and Implications

Auto-bidding is a crucial task in real-time advertising markets, where policies must optimize long-horizon value under delivery constraints (e.g., budget and CPA). Existing methods for auto-bidding rely on compact numerical state representations: while they can implicitly capture delivery dynamics, they offer limited support for explicitly representing and controlling high-level intent, evolving feedback, and operator-style strategic guidance in real campaigns. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a powerful method for encoding semantic information, it remains unclear when LLMs help and how to integrate them without sacrificing numerical precision. Through systematic preliminary studies, we find that (1) LLM embeddings contain bidding-relevant cues yet cannot replace numerical features, and (2) gains emerge only with careful semantic--numeric integration rather than naive concatenation. Motivated by these findings, we propose \textit{SemBid}, a novel auto-bidding framework that injects LLM-encoded semantics into offline bidding trajectories at the token level. SemBid introduces three semantic inputs: \textit{Task}, \textit{History}, and \textit{Strategy}. It injects these semantics as tokens alongside numerical trajectory tokens and uses self-attention to integrate them, improving controllability and generalization across objectives. Across diverse scenarios and budget regimes, SemBid outperforms competitive baselines from offline RL and generative sequence modeling, with more consistent gains in overall performance, constraint satisfaction, and robustness. Our code is available at: \href{https://github.com/AlanYu04/SemBid-KDD2026}{\textcolor{blue}{here}}.

PhysicsMind: Sim and Real Mechanics Benchmarking for Physical Reasoning and Prediction in Foundational VLMs and World Models

Modern foundational Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and video world models have advanced significantly in mathematical, common-sense, and visual reasoning, but their grasp of the underlying physics remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks attempting to measure this matter rely on synthetic, Visual Question Answer templates or focus on perceptual video quality that is tangential to measuring how well the video abides by physical laws. To address this fragmentation, we introduce PhysicsMind, a unified benchmark with both real and simulation environments that evaluates law-consistent reasoning and generation over three canonical principles: Center of Mass, Lever Equilibrium, and Newton's First Law. PhysicsMind comprises two main tasks: i) VQA tasks, testing whether models can reason and determine physical quantities and values from images or short videos, and ii) Video Generation(VG) tasks, evaluating if predicted motion trajectories obey the same center-of-mass, torque, and inertial constraints as the ground truth. A broad range of recent models and video generation models is evaluated on PhysicsMind and found to rely on appearance heuristics while often violating basic mechanics. These gaps indicate that current scaling and training are still insufficient for robust physical understanding, underscoring PhysicsMind as a focused testbed for physics-aware multimodal models. Our data will be released upon acceptance.

Teach Me How to Denoise: A Universal Framework for Denoising Multi-modal Recommender Systems via Guided Calibration

The surge in multimedia content has led to the development of Multi-Modal Recommender Systems (MMRecs), which use diverse modalities such as text, images, videos, and audio for more personalized recommendations. However, MMRecs struggle with noisy data caused by misalignment among modal content and the gap between modal semantics and recommendation semantics. Traditional denoising methods are inadequate due to the complexity of multi-modal data. To address this, we propose a universal guided in-sync distillation denoising framework for multi-modal recommendation (GUIDER), designed to improve MMRecs by denoising user feedback. Specifically, GUIDER uses a re-calibration strategy to identify clean and noisy interactions from modal content. It incorporates a Denoising Bayesian Personalized Ranking (DBPR) loss function to handle implicit user feedback. Finally, it applies a denoising knowledge distillation objective based on Optimal Transport distance to guide the alignment from modality representations to recommendation semantics. GUIDER can be seamlessly integrated into existing MMRecs methods as a plug-and-play solution. Experimental results on four public datasets demonstrate its effectiveness and generalizability. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Neon-Jing/Guider

CROSSAN: Towards Efficient and Effective Adaptation of Multiple Multimodal Foundation Models for Sequential Recommendation

Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs) excel at representing diverse raw modalities (e.g., text, images, audio, videos, etc.). As recommender systems increasingly incorporate these modalities, leveraging MFMs to generate better representations has great potential. However, their application in sequential recommendation remains largely unexplored. This is primarily because mainstream adaptation methods, such as Fine-Tuning and even Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques (e.g., Adapter and LoRA), incur high computational costs, especially when integrating multiple modality encoders, thus hindering research progress. As a result, it remains unclear whether we can efficiently and effectively adapt multiple (>2) MFMs for the sequential recommendation task. To address this, we propose a plug-and-play Cross-modal Side Adapter Network (CROSSAN). Leveraging the fully decoupled side adapter-based paradigm, CROSSAN achieves high efficiency while enabling cross-modal learning across diverse modalities. To optimize the final stage of multimodal fusion across diverse modalities, we adopt the Mixture of Modality Expert Fusion (MOMEF) mechanism. CROSSAN achieves superior performance on the public datasets for adapting four foundation models with raw modalities. Performance consistently improves as more MFMs are adapted. We will release our code and datasets to facilitate future research.

Video-Bench: Human-Aligned Video Generation Benchmark

Video generation assessment is essential for ensuring that generative models produce visually realistic, high-quality videos while aligning with human expectations. Current video generation benchmarks fall into two main categories: traditional benchmarks, which use metrics and embeddings to evaluate generated video quality across multiple dimensions but often lack alignment with human judgments; and large language model (LLM)-based benchmarks, though capable of human-like reasoning, are constrained by a limited understanding of video quality metrics and cross-modal consistency. To address these challenges and establish a benchmark that better aligns with human preferences, this paper introduces Video-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring a rich prompt suite and extensive evaluation dimensions. This benchmark represents the first attempt to systematically leverage MLLMs across all dimensions relevant to video generation assessment in generative models. By incorporating few-shot scoring and chain-of-query techniques, Video-Bench provides a structured, scalable approach to generated video evaluation. Experiments on advanced models including Sora demonstrate that Video-Bench achieves superior alignment with human preferences across all dimensions. Moreover, in instances where our framework's assessments diverge from human evaluations, it consistently offers more objective and accurate insights, suggesting an even greater potential advantage over traditional human judgment.

An Empirical Study of Training ID-Agnostic Multi-modal Sequential Recommenders

Sequential Recommendation (SR) aims to predict future user-item interactions based on historical interactions. While many SR approaches concentrate on user IDs and item IDs, the human perception of the world through multi-modal signals, like text and images, has inspired researchers to delve into constructing SR from multi-modal information without using IDs. However, the complexity of multi-modal learning manifests in diverse feature extractors, fusion methods, and pre-trained models. Consequently, designing a simple and universal \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{M}odal \textbf{S}equential \textbf{R}ecommendation (\textbf{MMSR}) framework remains a formidable challenge. We systematically summarize the existing multi-modal related SR methods and distill the essence into four core components: visual encoder, text encoder, multimodal fusion module, and sequential architecture. Along these dimensions, we dissect the model designs, and answer the following sub-questions: First, we explore how to construct MMSR from scratch, ensuring its performance either on par with or exceeds existing SR methods without complex techniques. Second, we examine if MMSR can benefit from existing multi-modal pre-training paradigms. Third, we assess MMSR's capability in tackling common challenges like cold start and domain transferring. Our experiment results across four real-world recommendation scenarios demonstrate the great potential ID-agnostic multi-modal sequential recommendation. Our framework can be found at: https://github.com/MMSR23/MMSR.

Multi-Modality is All You Need for Transferable Recommender Systems

ID-based Recommender Systems (RecSys), where each item is assigned a unique identifier and subsequently converted into an embedding vector, have dominated the designing of RecSys. Though prevalent, such ID-based paradigm is not suitable for developing transferable RecSys and is also susceptible to the cold-start issue. In this paper, we unleash the boundaries of the ID-based paradigm and propose a Pure Multi-Modality based Recommender system (PMMRec), which relies solely on the multi-modal contents of the items (e.g., texts and images) and learns transition patterns general enough to transfer across domains and platforms. Specifically, we design a plug-and-play framework architecture consisting of multi-modal item encoders, a fusion module, and a user encoder. To align the cross-modal item representations, we propose a novel next-item enhanced cross-modal contrastive learning objective, which is equipped with both inter- and intra-modality negative samples and explicitly incorporates the transition patterns of user behaviors into the item encoders. To ensure the robustness of user representations, we propose a novel noised item detection objective and a robustness-aware contrastive learning objective, which work together to denoise user sequences in a self-supervised manner. PMMRec is designed to be loosely coupled, so after being pre-trained on the source data, each component can be transferred alone, or in conjunction with other components, allowing PMMRec to achieve versatility under both multi-modality and single-modality transfer learning settings. Extensive experiments on 4 sources and 10 target datasets demonstrate that PMMRec surpasses the state-of-the-art recommenders in both recommendation performance and transferability. Our code and dataset is available at: https://github.com/ICDE24/PMMRec.

A Content-Driven Micro-Video Recommendation Dataset at Scale

Micro-videos have recently gained immense popularity, sparking critical research in micro-video recommendation with significant implications for the entertainment, advertising, and e-commerce industries. However, the lack of large-scale public micro-video datasets poses a major challenge for developing effective recommender systems. To address this challenge, we introduce a very large micro-video recommendation dataset, named "MicroLens", consisting of one billion user-item interaction behaviors, 34 million users, and one million micro-videos. This dataset also contains various raw modality information about videos, including titles, cover images, audio, and full-length videos. MicroLens serves as a benchmark for content-driven micro-video recommendation, enabling researchers to utilize various modalities of video information for recommendation, rather than relying solely on item IDs or off-the-shelf video features extracted from a pre-trained network. Our benchmarking of multiple recommender models and video encoders on MicroLens has yielded valuable insights into the performance of micro-video recommendation. We believe that this dataset will not only benefit the recommender system community but also promote the development of the video understanding field. Our datasets and code are available at https://github.com/westlake-repl/MicroLens.