KuaiLive: A Real-time Interactive Dataset for Live Streaming Recommendation

Live streaming platforms have become a dominant form of online content consumption, offering dynamically evolving content, real-time interactions, and highly engaging user experiences. These unique characteristics introduce new challenges that differentiate live streaming recommendation from traditional recommendation settings and have garnered increasing attention from industry in recent years. However, research progress in academia has been hindered by the lack of publicly available datasets that accurately reflect the dynamic nature of live streaming environments. To address this gap, we introduce KuaiLive, the first real-time, interactive dataset collected from Kuaishou, a leading live streaming platform in China with over 400 million daily active users. The dataset records the interaction logs of 23,772 users and 452,621 streamers over a 21-day period. Compared to existing datasets, KuaiLive offers several advantages: it includes precise live room start and end timestamps, multiple types of real-time user interactions (click, comment, like, gift), and rich side information features for both users and streamers. These features enable more realistic simulation of dynamic candidate items and better modeling of user and streamer behaviors. We conduct a thorough analysis of KuaiLive from multiple perspectives and evaluate several representative recommendation methods on it, establishing a strong benchmark for future research. KuaiLive can support a wide range of tasks in the live streaming domain, such as top-K recommendation, click-through rate prediction, watch time prediction, and gift price prediction. Moreover, its fine-grained behavioral data also enables research on multi-behavior modeling, multi-task learning, and fairness-aware recommendation. The dataset and related resources are publicly available at https://imgkkk574.github.io/KuaiLive.

Streamlining Admission with LOR Insights: AI-Based Leadership Assessment in Online Master's Program

Letters of recommendation (LORs) provide valuable insights into candidates' capabilities and experiences beyond standardized test scores. However, reviewing these text-heavy materials is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this challenge and support the admission committee in providing feedback for students' professional growth, our study introduces LORI: LOR Insights, a novel AI-based detection tool for assessing leadership skills in LORs submitted by online master's program applicants. By employing natural language processing and leveraging large language models using RoBERTa and LLAMA, we seek to identify leadership attributes such as teamwork, communication, and innovation. Our latest RoBERTa model achieves a weighted F1 score of 91.6%, a precision of 92.4%, and a recall of 91.6%, showing a strong level of consistency in our test data. With the growing importance of leadership skills in the STEM sector, integrating LORI into the graduate admissions process is crucial for accurately assessing applicants' leadership capabilities. This approach not only streamlines the admissions process but also automates and ensures a more comprehensive evaluation of candidates' capabilities.

On the Reliability of Sampling Strategies in Offline Recommender Evaluation

Offline evaluation plays a central role in benchmarking recommender systems when online testing is impractical or risky. However, it is susceptible to two key sources of bias: exposure bias, where users only interact with items they are shown, and sampling bias, introduced when evaluation is performed on a subset of logged items rather than the full catalog. While prior work has proposed methods to mitigate sampling bias, these are typically assessed on fixed logged datasets rather than for their ability to support reliable model comparisons under varying exposure conditions or relative to true user preferences. In this paper, we investigate how different combinations of logging and sampling choices affect the reliability of offline evaluation. Using a fully observed dataset as ground truth, we systematically simulate diverse exposure biases and assess the reliability of common sampling strategies along four dimensions: sampling resolution (recommender model separability), fidelity (agreement with full evaluation), robustness (stability under exposure bias), and predictive power (alignment with ground truth). Our findings highlight when and how sampling distorts evaluation outcomes and offer practical guidance for selecting strategies that yield faithful and robust offline comparisons.

Artificial Intelligence-Based Classification of Spitz Tumors

Spitz tumors are diagnostically challenging due to overlap in atypical histological features with conventional melanomas. We investigated to what extent AI models, using histological and/or clinical features, can: (1) distinguish Spitz tumors from conventional melanomas; (2) predict the underlying genetic aberration of Spitz tumors; and (3) predict the diagnostic category of Spitz tumors. The AI models were developed and validated using a dataset of 393 Spitz tumors and 379 conventional melanomas. Predictive performance was measured using the AUROC and the accuracy. The performance of the AI models was compared with that of four experienced pathologists in a reader study. Moreover, a simulation experiment was conducted to investigate the impact of implementing AI-based recommendations for ancillary diagnostic testing on the workflow of the pathology department. The best AI model based on UNI features reached an AUROC of 0.95 and an accuracy of 0.86 in differentiating Spitz tumors from conventional melanomas. The genetic aberration was predicted with an accuracy of 0.55 compared to 0.25 for randomly guessing. The diagnostic category was predicted with an accuracy of 0.51, where random chance-level accuracy equaled 0.33. On all three tasks, the AI models performed better than the four pathologists, although differences were not statistically significant for most individual comparisons. Based on the simulation experiment, implementing AI-based recommendations for ancillary diagnostic testing could reduce material costs, turnaround times, and examinations. In conclusion, the AI models achieved a strong predictive performance in distinguishing between Spitz tumors and conventional melanomas. On the more challenging tasks of predicting the genetic aberration and the diagnostic category of Spitz tumors, the AI models performed better than random chance.

Does Multimodality Improve Recommender Systems as Expected? A Critical Analysis and Future Directions

Multimodal recommendation systems are increasingly popular for their potential to improve performance by integrating diverse data types. However, the actual benefits of this integration remain unclear, raising questions about when and how it truly enhances recommendations. In this paper, we propose a structured evaluation framework to systematically assess multimodal recommendations across four dimensions: Comparative Efficiency, Recommendation Tasks, Recommendation Stages, and Multimodal Data Integration. We benchmark a set of reproducible multimodal models against strong traditional baselines and evaluate their performance on different platforms. Our findings show that multimodal data is particularly beneficial in sparse interaction scenarios and during the recall stage of recommendation pipelines. We also observe that the importance of each modality is task-specific, where text features are more useful in e-commerce and visual features are more effective in short-video recommendations. Additionally, we explore different integration strategies and model sizes, finding that Ensemble-Based Learning outperforms Fusion-Based Learning, and that larger models do not necessarily deliver better results. To deepen our understanding, we include case studies and review findings from other recommendation domains. Our work provides practical insights for building efficient and effective multimodal recommendation systems, emphasizing the need for thoughtful modality selection, integration strategies, and model design.

Evaluation of a Sign Language Avatar on Comprehensibility, User Experience \& Acceptability

This paper presents an investigation into the impact of adding adjustment features to an existing sign language (SL) avatar on a Microsoft Hololens 2 device. Through a detailed analysis of interactions of expert German Sign Language (DGS) users with both adjustable and non-adjustable avatars in a specific use case, this study identifies the key factors influencing the comprehensibility, the user experience (UX), and the acceptability of such a system. Despite user preference for adjustable settings, no significant improvements in UX or comprehensibility were observed, which remained at low levels, amid missing SL elements (mouthings and facial expressions) and implementation issues (indistinct hand shapes, lack of feedback and menu positioning). Hedonic quality was rated higher than pragmatic quality, indicating that users found the system more emotionally or aesthetically pleasing than functionally useful. Stress levels were higher for the adjustable avatar, reflecting lower performance, greater effort and more frustration. Additionally, concerns were raised about whether the Hololens adjustment gestures are intuitive and easy to familiarise oneself with. While acceptability of the concept of adjustability was generally positive, it was strongly dependent on usability and animation quality. This study highlights that personalisation alone is insufficient, and that SL avatars must be comprehensible by default. Key recommendations include enhancing mouthing and facial animation, improving interaction interfaces, and applying participatory design.

Multi-Modal Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation with Conditional Diffusion-Based Feature Denoising

The sequential recommendation system utilizes historical user interactions to predict preferences. Effectively integrating diverse user behavior patterns with rich multimodal information of items to enhance the accuracy of sequential recommendations is an emerging and challenging research direction. This paper focuses on the problem of multi-modal multi-behavior sequential recommendation, aiming to address the following challenges: (1) the lack of effective characterization of modal preferences across different behaviors, as user attention to different item modalities varies depending on the behavior; (2) the difficulty of effectively mitigating implicit noise in user behavior, such as unintended actions like accidental clicks; (3) the inability to handle modality noise in multi-modal representations, which further impacts the accurate modeling of user preferences. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation model (M$^3$BSR). This model first removes noise in multi-modal representations using a Conditional Diffusion Modality Denoising Layer. Subsequently, it utilizes deep behavioral information to guide the denoising of shallow behavioral data, thereby alleviating the impact of noise in implicit feedback through Conditional Diffusion Behavior Denoising. Finally, by introducing a Multi-Expert Interest Extraction Layer, M$^3$BSR explicitly models the common and specific interests across behaviors and modalities to enhance recommendation performance. Experimental results indicate that M$^3$BSR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.

The Term 'Agent' Has Been Diluted Beyond Utility and Requires Redefinition

The term 'agent' in artificial intelligence has long carried multiple interpretations across different subfields. Recent developments in AI capabilities, particularly in large language model systems, have amplified this ambiguity, creating significant challenges in research communication, system evaluation and reproducibility, and policy development. This paper argues that the term 'agent' requires redefinition. Drawing from historical analysis and contemporary usage patterns, we propose a framework that defines clear minimum requirements for a system to be considered an agent while characterizing systems along a multidimensional spectrum of environmental interaction, learning and adaptation, autonomy, goal complexity, and temporal coherence. This approach provides precise vocabulary for system description while preserving the term's historically multifaceted nature. After examining potential counterarguments and implementation challenges, we provide specific recommendations for moving forward as a field, including suggestions for terminology standardization and framework adoption. The proposed approach offers practical tools for improving research clarity and reproducibility while supporting more effective policy development.

Decision-Making with Deliberation: Meta-reviewing as a Document-grounded Dialogue

Meta-reviewing is a pivotal stage in the peer-review process, serving as the final step in determining whether a paper is recommended for acceptance. Prior research on meta-reviewing has treated this as a summarization problem over review reports. However, complementary to this perspective, meta-reviewing is a decision-making process that requires weighing reviewer arguments and placing them within a broader context. Prior research has demonstrated that decision-makers can be effectively assisted in such scenarios via dialogue agents. In line with this framing, we explore the practical challenges for realizing dialog agents that can effectively assist meta-reviewers. Concretely, we first address the issue of data scarcity for training dialogue agents by generating synthetic data using Large Language Models (LLMs) based on a self-refinement strategy to improve the relevance of these dialogues to expert domains. Our experiments demonstrate that this method produces higher-quality synthetic data and can serve as a valuable resource towards training meta-reviewing assistants. Subsequently, we utilize this data to train dialogue agents tailored for meta-reviewing and find that these agents outperform \emph{off-the-shelf} LLM-based assistants for this task. Finally, we apply our agents in real-world meta-reviewing scenarios and confirm their effectiveness in enhancing the efficiency of meta-reviewing.\footnote{Code and Data: https://github.com/UKPLab/arxiv2025-meta-review-as-dialog

FIRE: Faithful Interpretable Recommendation Explanations

Natural language explanations in recommender systems are often framed as a review generation task, leveraging user reviews as ground-truth supervision. While convenient, this approach conflates a user's opinion with the system's reasoning, leading to explanations that may be fluent but fail to reflect the true logic behind recommendations. In this work, we revisit the core objective of explainable recommendation: to transparently communicate why an item is recommended by linking user needs to relevant item features. Through a comprehensive analysis of existing methods across multiple benchmark datasets, we identify common limitations-explanations that are weakly aligned with model predictions, vague or inaccurate in identifying user intents, and overly repetitive or generic. To overcome these challenges, we propose FIRE, a lightweight and interpretable framework that combines SHAP-based feature attribution with structured, prompt-driven language generation. FIRE produces faithful, diverse, and user-aligned explanations, grounded in the actual decision-making process of the model. Our results demonstrate that FIRE not only achieves competitive recommendation accuracy but also significantly improves explanation quality along critical dimensions such as alignment, structure, and faithfulness. This work highlights the need to move beyond the review-as-explanation paradigm and toward explanation methods that are both accountable and interpretable.