Semantic Trimming and Auxiliary Multi-step Prediction for Generative Recommendation

Generative Recommendation (GR) has recently transitioned from atomic item-indexing to Semantic ID (SID)-based frameworks to capture intrinsic item relationships and enhance generalization. However, the adoption of high-granularity SIDs leads to two critical challenges: prohibitive training overhead due to sequence expansion and unstable performance reliability characterized by non-monotonic accuracy fluctuations. We identify that these disparate issues are fundamentally rooted in the Semantic Dilution Effect, where redundant tokens waste massive computation and dilute the already sparse learning signals in recommendation. To counteract this, we propose STAMP (Semantic Trimming and Auxiliary Multi-step Prediction), a framework utilizing a dual-end optimization strategy. We argue that effective SID learning requires simultaneously addressing low input information density and sparse output supervision. On the input side, Semantic Adaptive Pruning (SAP) dynamically filters redundancy during the forward pass, converting noise-laden sequences into compact, information-rich representations. On the output side, Multi-step Auxiliary Prediction (MAP) employs a multi-token objective to densify feedback, strengthening long-range dependency capture and ensuring robust learning signals despite compressed inputs. Unifying input purification and signal amplification, STAMP enhances both training efficiency and representation capability. Experiments on public Amazon and large-scale industrial datasets show STAMP achieves 1.23--1.38$\times$ speedup and 17.2\%--54.7\% VRAM reduction while maintaining or improving performance across multiple architectures.

Next-Scale Generative Reranking: A Tree-based Generative Rerank Method at Meituan

In modern multi-stage recommendation systems, reranking plays a critical role by modeling contextual information. Due to inherent challenges such as the combinatorial space complexity, an increasing number of methods adopt the generative paradigm: the generator produces the optimal list during inference, while an evaluator guides the generator's optimization during the training phase. However, these methods still face two problems. Firstly, these generators fail to produce optimal generation results due to the lack of both local and global perspectives, regardless of whether the generation strategy is autoregressive or non-autoregressive. Secondly, the goal inconsistency problem between the generator and the evaluator during training complicates the guidance signal and leading to suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose the \textbf{N}ext-\textbf{S}cale \textbf{G}eneration \textbf{R}eranking (NSGR), a tree-based generative framework. Specifically, we introduce a next-scale generator (NSG) that progressively expands a recommendation list from user interests in a coarse-to-fine manner, balancing global and local perspectives. Furthermore, we design a multi-scale neighbor loss, which leverages a tree-based multi-scale evaluator (MSE) to provide scale-specific guidance to the NSG at each scale. Extensive experiments on public and industrial datasets validate the effectiveness of NSGR. And NSGR has been successfully deployed on the Meituan food delivery platform.

Curr-RLCER:Curriculum Reinforcement Learning For Coherence Explainable Recommendation

Explainable recommendation systems (RSs) are designed to explicitly uncover the rationale of each recommendation, thereby enhancing the transparency and credibility of RSs. Previous methods often jointly predicted ratings and generated explanations, but overlooked the incoherence of such two objectives. To address this issue, we propose Curr-RLCER, a reinforcement learning framework for explanation coherent recommendation with dynamic rating alignment. It employs curriculum learning, transitioning from basic predictions (i.e., click through rating-CTR, selection-based rating) to open-ended recommendation explanation generation. In particular, the rewards of each stage are designed for progressively enhancing the stability of RSs. Furthermore, a coherence-driven reward mechanism is also proposed to enforce the coherence between generated explanations and predicted ratings, supported by a specifically designed evaluation scheme. The extensive experimental results on three explainable recommendation datasets indicate that the proposed framework is effective. Codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/pxcstart/Curr-RLCER.

From Clues to Generation: Language-Guided Conditional Diffusion for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Cross-domain Recommendation (CDR) exploits multi-domain correlations to alleviate data sparsity. As a core task within this field, inter-domain recommendation focuses on predicting preferences for users who interact in a source domain but lack behavioral records in a target domain. Existing approaches predominantly rely on overlapping users as anchors for knowledge transfer. In real-world scenarios, overlapping users are often scarce, leaving the vast majority of users with only single-domain interactions. For these users, the absence of explicit alignment signals makes fine-grained preference transfer intrinsically difficult. To address this challenge, this paper proposes Language-Guided Conditional Diffusion for CDR (LGCD), a novel framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) and diffusion models for inter-domain sequential recommendation. Specifically, we leverage LLM reasoning to bridge the domain gap by inferring potential target preferences for single-domain users and mapping them to real items, thereby constructing pseudo-overlapping data. We distinguish between real and pseudo-interaction pathways and introduce additional supervision constraints to mitigate the semantic noise brought by pseudo-interaction. Furthermore, we design a conditional diffusion architecture to precisely guide the generation of target user representations based on source-domain patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LGCD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in inter-domain recommendation tasks.

Pay Attention to Sequence Split: Uncovering the Impacts of Sub-Sequence Splitting on Sequential Recommendation Models

Sub-sequence splitting (SSS) has been demonstrated as an effective approach to mitigate data sparsity in sequential recommendation (SR) by splitting a raw user interaction sequence into multiple sub-sequences. Previous studies have demonstrated its ability to enhance the performance of SR models significantly. However, in this work, we discover that \textbf{(i). SSS may interfere with the evaluation of the model's actual performance.} We observed that many recent state-of-the-art SR models employ SSS during the data reading stage (not mentioned in the papers). When we removed this operation, performance significantly declined, even falling below that of earlier classical SR models. The varying improvements achieved by SSS and different splitting methods across different models prompt us to analyze further when SSS proves effective. We find that \textbf{(ii). SSS demonstrates strong capabilities only when specific splitting methods, target strategies, and loss functions are used together.} Inappropriate combinations may even harm performance. Furthermore, we analyze why sub-sequence splitting yields such remarkable performance gains and find that \textbf{(iii). it evens out the distribution of training data while increasing the likelihood that different items are targeted.} Finally, we provide suggestions for overcoming SSS interference, along with a discussion on data augmentation methods and future directions. We hope this work will prompt the broader community to re-examine the impact of data splitting on SR and promote fairer, more rigorous model evaluation. All analysis code and data will be made available upon acceptance. We provide a simple, anonymous implementation at https://github.com/KingGugu/SSS4SR.

When Do We Need LLMs? A Diagnostic for Language-Driven Bandits

We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic sequential decision making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer selection; all frequent problems in finance). While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to these settings, utilizing LLMs for reasoning at every decision step is computationally expensive and uncertainty estimates are difficult to obtain. To address this, we introduce LLMP-UCB, a bandit algorithm that derives uncertainty estimates from LLMs via repeated inference. However, our experiments demonstrate that lightweight numerical bandits operating on text embeddings (dense or Matryoshka) match or exceed the accuracy of LLM-based solutions at a fraction of their cost. We further show that embedding dimensionality is a practical lever on the exploration-exploitation balance, enabling cost--performance tradeoffs without prompt complexity. Finally, to guide practitioners, we propose a geometric diagnostic based on the arms' embedding to decide when to use LLM-driven reasoning versus a lightweight numerical bandit. Our results provide a principled deployment framework for cost-effective, uncertainty-aware decision systems with broad applicability across AI use cases in financial services.

Content Fuzzing for Escaping Information Cocoons on Digital Social Media

Information cocoons on social media limit users' exposure to posts with diverse viewpoints. Modern platforms use stance detection as an important signal in recommendation and ranking pipelines, which can route posts primarily to like-minded audiences and reduce cross-cutting exposure. This restricts the reach of dissenting opinions and hinders constructive discourse. We take the creator's perspective and investigate how content can be revised to reach beyond existing affinity clusters. We present ContentFuzz, a confidence-guided fuzzing framework that rewrites posts while preserving their human-interpreted intent and induces different machine-inferred stance labels. ContentFuzz aims to route posts beyond their original cocoons. Our method guides a large language model (LLM) to generate meaning-preserving rewrites using confidence feedback from stance detection models. Evaluated on four representative stance detection models across three datasets in two languages, ContentFuzz effectively changes machine-classified stance labels, while maintaining semantic integrity with respect to the original content.

"Don't Be Afraid, Just Learn": Insights from Industry Practitioners to Prepare Software Engineers in the Age of Generative AI

Although tension between university curricula and industry expectations has existed in some form for decades, the rapid integration of generative AI (GenAI) tools into software development has recently widened the gap between the two domains. To better understand this disconnect, we surveyed 51 industry practitioners (software developers, technical leads, upper management, \etc) and conducted 11 follow-up interviews focused on hiring practices, required job skills, perceived shortcomings in university curricula, and views on how university learning outcomes can be improved. Our results suggest that GenAI creates demand for new skills (\eg prompting and output evaluation), while strengthening the importance of soft-skills (\eg problem solving and critical thinking) and traditional competencies (\eg architecture design and debugging). We synthesize these findings into actionable recommendations for academia (\eg how to incorporate GenAI into curricula and evaluation redesign). Our work offers empirical guidance to help educators prepare students for modern software engineering environments.

Plasma GraphRAG: Physics-Grounded Parameter Selection for Gyrokinetic Simulations

Accurate parameter selection is fundamental to gyrokinetic plasma simulations, yet current practices rely heavily on manual literature reviews, leading to inefficiencies and inconsistencies. We introduce Plasma GraphRAG, a novel framework that integrates Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) with large language models (LLMs) for automated, physics-grounded parameter range identification. By constructing a domain-specific knowledge graph from curated plasma literature and enabling structured retrieval over graph-anchored entities and relations, Plasma GraphRAG enables LLMs to generate accurate, context-aware recommendations. Extensive evaluations across five metrics, comprehensiveness, diversity, grounding, hallucination, and empowerment, demonstrate that Plasma GraphRAG outperforms vanilla RAG by over $10\%$ in overall quality and reduces hallucination rates by up to $25\%$. {Beyond enhancing simulation reliability, Plasma GraphRAG offers a methodology for accelerating scientific discovery across complex, data-rich domains.

CRAB: Codebook Rebalancing for Bias Mitigation in Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation (GeneRec) has introduced a new paradigm that represents items as discrete semantic tokens and predicts items in a generative manner. Despite its strong performance across multiple recommendation tasks, existing GeneRec approaches still suffer from severe popularity bias and may even exacerbate it. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis to uncover the root causes of this phenomenon, yielding two core insights: 1) imbalanced tokenization inherits and can further amplify popularity bias from historical item interactions; 2) current training procedures disproportionately favor popular tokens while neglecting semantic relationships among tokens, thereby intensifying popularity bias. Building on these insights, we propose CRAB, a post-hoc debiasing strategy for GeneRec that alleviates popularity bias by mitigating frequency imbalance among semantic tokens. Specifically, given a well-trained model, we first rebalance the codebook by splitting over-popular tokens while preserving their hierarchical semantic structure. Based on the adjusted codebook, we further introduce a tree-structured regularizer to enhance semantic consistency, encouraging more informative representations for unpopular tokens during training. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that CRAB significantly improves recommendation performance by effectively alleviating popularity bias.