Self-Distilled Reinforcement Learning for Co-Evolving Agentic Recommender Systems

Large language model-empowered agentic recommender systems (ARS) reformulate recommendation as a multi-turn interaction between a recommender agent and a user agent, enabling iterative preference elicitation and refinement beyond conventional one-shot prediction. However, existing ARS are mainly optimized in a Reflexion-style paradigm, where past interaction trajectories are stored as textual memory and retrieved as prompt context for later reasoning. Although this design allows agents to recall prior feedback and observations, the accumulated experience remains external to model parameters, leaving agents reliant on generic reasoning rather than progressively acquiring recommendation-specific decision-making ability through learning. Reinforcement learning (RL) therefore provides a natural way to internalize such interaction experience into parameters. Yet existing RL methods for ARS still suffer from two key limitations. First, they fail to capture the interactive nature of ARS, in which the recommender agent and the user agent continuously influence each other and can naturally generate endogenous supervision through interaction feedback. Second, they reduce a rich multi-turn interaction process to final outcomes, overlooking the dense supervision embedded throughout the trajectory. To this end, we propose CoARS, a self-distilled reinforcement learning framework for co-evolving agentic recommender systems. CoARS introduces two complementary learning schemes: interaction reward, which derives coupled task-level supervision for the recommender agent and the user agent from the same interaction trajectory, and self-distilled credit assignment, which converts historical trajectories into token-level credit signals under teacher-student conditioning. Experiments on multiple datasets show that CoARS outperforms representative ARS baselines in recommendation performance and user alignment.

Like a Hammer, It Can Build, It Can Break: Large Language Model Uses, Perceptions, and Adoption in Cybersecurity Operations on Reddit

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as promising tools for augmenting Security Operations Center (SOC) workflows, with vendors increasingly marketing autonomous AI solutions for SOCs. However, there remains a limited empirical understanding of how such tools are used, perceived, and adopted by real-world security practitioners. To address this gap, we conduct a mixed-methods analysis of discussions in cybersecurity-focused forums to learn how a diverse group of practitioners use and perceive modern LLM tools for security operations. More specifically, we analyzed 892 posts between December 2022 and September 2025 from three cybersecurity-focused forums on Reddit, and, using a combination of qualitative coding and statistical analysis, examined how security practitioners discuss LLM tools across three dimensions: (1) their stated tools and use cases, (2) the perceived pros and cons of each tool across a set of critical factors, and (3) their adoption of such tools and the expected impacts on the cybersecurity industry and individual analysts. Overall, our findings reveal nuanced patterns in LLM tools adoption, highlighting independent use of LLMs for low-risk, productivity-oriented tasks, alongside active interest around enterprise-grade, security-focused LLM platforms. Although practitioners report meaningful gains in efficiency and effectiveness in LLM-assisted workflows, persistent issues with reliability, verification overheads, and security risks sharply constrain the autonomy granted to LLM tools. Based on these results, we also provide recommendations for developing and adopting LLM tools to ensure the security of organizations and the safety of cybersecurity practitioners.

From Recency Bias to Stable Convergence Block Kaczmarz Methods for Online Preference Learning in Matchmaking Applications

We present a family of Kaczmarz-based preference learning algorithms for real-time personalized matchmaking in reciprocal recommender systems. Post-step L2 normalization, common in Kaczmarz-inspired online learners, induces exponential recency bias: the influence of the t-th interaction decays as eta^(n - t), reaching approximately 1e-6 after just 20 swipes at eta = 0.5. We resolve this by replacing the normalization step with a Tikhonov-regularized projection denominator that bounds step size analytically without erasing interaction history. When candidate tag vectors are not pre-normalized, as in realistic deployments where candidates vary in tag density, the Tikhonov denominator ||a||^2 + alpha produces genuinely per-candidate adaptive step sizes, making it structurally distinct from online gradient descent with any fixed learning rate. We further derive a block variant that processes full swipe sessions as a single Gram matrix solve. Population-scale simulation over 6,400 swipes reveals that Block Normalized Kaczmarz (BlockNK), which combines the batch Gram solve with post-session L2 normalization, achieves the highest preference alignment (Align@20 = 0.698), the strongest inter-session direction stability (delta = 0.994), and the flattest degradation profile under label noise across flip ratios p_flip in [0.10, 0.35]. Experiments under cosine similarity subsampling further show that adaptively filtering the candidate pool toward the current preference direction substantially improves asymptotic alignment, at the cost of introducing a feedback loop that may slow recovery from miscalibration. The sequential Tikhonov-Kaczmarz method performs comparably to K-NoNorm under our simulation conditions, suggesting the dominant practical gain over normalized Kaczmarz is the removal of per-step normalization rather than the Tikhonov constant alpha itself.

TME-PSR: Time-aware, Multi-interest, and Explanation Personalization for Sequential Recommendation

In this paper, we propose a sequential recommendation model that integrates Time-aware personalization, Multi-interest personalization, and Explanation personalization for Personalized Sequential Recommendation (TME-PSR). That is, we consider the differences across different users in temporal rhythm preference, multiple fine-grained latent interests, and the personalized semantic alignment between recommendations and explanations. Specifically, the proposed TME-PSR model employs a dual-view gated time encoder to capture personalized temporal rhythms, a lightweight multihead Linear Recurrent Unit architecture that enables fine-grained sub-interest modeling with improved efficiency, and a dynamic dual-branch mutual information weighting mechanism to achieve personalized alignment between recommendations and explanations. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method consistently improves recommendation accuracy and explanation quality, at a lower computational cost.

Through Their Eyes: Fixation-aligned Tuning for Personalized User Emulation

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed as scalable user simulators for recommender system evaluation. Yet existing simulators perceive recommendations through text or structured metadata rather than the visual interfaces real users browse-a critical gap, since attention over recommendation layouts is both visually driven and highly personalized. We investigate whether aligning a vision-language model's (VLM's) visual attention with user-specific gaze patterns can improve simulation fidelity. Analysis of a real-world eye-tracking dataset collected in a carousel-based recommendation setting reveals that users exhibit stable individual gaze patterns strongly predictive of click behavior. Building on this finding, we propose Fixation-Aligned Tuning for user Emulation (FixATE). Our approach first probes the VLM's internal visual attention via interpretability operators to obtain a slot-level relevance distribution comparable with human fixation, and then learns personalized soft prompts to steer the model's attention toward each user's characteristic fixation pattern. Experiments across three interpretability-based probing operators and two architecturally distinct VLM backbones demonstrate consistent improvements in both attention alignment and click prediction accuracy. These results suggest that making the model "see like the user" is a viable path toward simulators that more faithfully reproduce how users perceive and act in recommendation interfaces.

CORA: Conformal Risk-Controlled Agents for Safeguarded Mobile GUI Automation

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by vision language models (VLMs) are rapidly moving from passive assistance to autonomous operation. However, this unrestricted action space exposes users to severe and irreversible financial, privacy or social harm. Existing safeguards rely on prompt engineering, brittle heuristics and VLM-as-critic lack formal verification and user-tunable guarantees. We propose CORA (COnformal Risk-controlled GUI Agent), a post-policy, pre-action safeguarding framework that provides statistical guarantees on harmful executed actions. CORA reformulates safety as selective action execution: we train a Guardian model to estimate action-conditional risk for each proposed step. Rather than thresholding raw scores, we leverage Conformal Risk Control to calibrate an execute/abstain boundary that satisfies a user-specified risk budget and route rejected actions to a trainable Diagnostician model, which performs multimodal reasoning over rejected actions to recommend interventions (e.g., confirm, reflect, or abort) to minimize user burden. A Goal-Lock mechanism anchors assessment to a clarified, frozen user intent to resist visual injection attacks. To rigorously evaluate this paradigm, we introduce Phone-Harm, a new benchmark of mobile safety violations with step-level harm labels under real-world settings. Experiments on Phone-Harm and public benchmarks against diverse baselines validate that CORA improves the safety--helpfulness--interruption Pareto frontier, offering a practical, statistically grounded safety paradigm for autonomous GUI execution. Code and benchmark are available at cora-agent.github.io.

IAT: Instance-As-Token Compression for Historical User Sequence Modeling in Industrial Recommender Systems

Although sophisticated sequence modeling paradigms have achieved remarkable success in recommender systems, the information capacity of hand-crafted sequential features constrains the performance upper bound. To better enhance user experience by encoding historical interaction patterns, this paper presents a novel two-stage sequence modeling framework termed Instance-As-Token (IAT). The first stage of IAT compresses all features of each historical interaction instance into a unified instance embedding, which encodes the interaction characteristics in a compact yet informative token. Both temporal-order and user-order compression schemes are proposed, with the latter better aligning with the demands of downstream sequence modeling. The second stage involves the downstream task fetching fixed-length compressed instance tokens via timestamps and adopting standard sequence modeling approaches to learn long-range preferences patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and exhibits superior in-domain and cross-domain transferability. IAT has been successfully deployed in real-world industrial recommender systems, including e-commerce advertising, shopping mall marketing, and live-streaming e-commerce, delivering substantial improvements in key business metrics.

Hybrid Cold-Start Recommender System for Closure Model Selection in Multiphase Flow Simulations

Selecting appropriate physical models is a critical yet difficult step in many areas of computational science and engineering. In multiphase Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), practitioners must choose among numerous closure model combinations whose performance varies strongly across flow conditions. Sub-optimal choices can lead to inaccurate predictions, simulation failures, and wasted computational resources, making model selection a prime candidate for data-driven decision support. This work formulates closure model selection as a cold-start recommender system problem in a high-cost scientific domain. We propose a hybrid recommendation framework that combines (i) metadata-driven case similarity and (ii) collaborative inference via matrix completion. The approach enables case-specific model recommendations for entirely new CFD cases using their descriptive features, while leveraging historical simulation results from similar cases. The methodology is evaluated on 13,600 simulations across 136 validation cases and 100 model combinations. A nested cross-validation protocol with experiment-level holdout is employed to rigorously assess generalisation to unseen flow scenarios under varying levels of data sparsity. Recommendation quality is measured using ranking-based metrics and a domain-specific regret measure capturing performance loss relative to the per-case optimum. Results show that the proposed hybrid recommender consistently outperforms popularity-based and expert-designed reference models and reduces regret across the investigated sparsities. These findings demonstrate that recommender system methodology can effectively support complex scientific decision-making tasks characterised by expensive evaluations, structured metadata, and limited prior observations.

Scheming in the wild: detecting real-world AI scheming incidents with open-source intelligence

Scheming, the covert pursuit of misaligned goals by AI systems, represents a potentially catastrophic risk, yet scheming research suffers from significant limitations. In particular, scheming evaluations demonstrate behaviours that may not occur in real-world settings, limiting scientific understanding, hindering policy development, and not enabling real-time detection of loss of control incidents. Real-world evidence is needed, but current monitoring techniques are not effective for this purpose. This paper introduces a novel open-source intelligence (OSINT) methodology for detecting real-world scheming incidents: collecting and analysing transcripts from chatbot conversations or command-line interactions shared online. Analysing over 183,420 transcripts from X (formerly Twitter), we identify 698 real-world scheming-related incidents between October 2025 and March 2026. We observe a statistically significant 4.9x increase in monthly incidents from the first to last month, compared to a 1.7x increase in posts discussing scheming. We find evidence of multiple scheming-related behaviours in real-world deployments previously reported only in experiments, many resulting in real-world harms. While we did not detect catastrophic scheming incidents, the behaviours observed demonstrate concerning precursors, such as willingness to disregard instructions, circumvent safeguards, lie to users, and single-mindedly pursue goals in harmful ways. As AI systems become more capable, these could evolve into more strategic scheming with potentially catastrophic consequences. Our findings demonstrate the viability of transcript-based OSINT as a scalable approach to real-world scheming detection supporting scientific research, policy development, and emergency response. We recommend further investment towards OSINT techniques for monitoring scheming and loss of control.

Beyond Isolated Clients: Integrating Graph-Based Embeddings into Event Sequence Models

Large-scale digital platforms generate billions of timestamped user-item interactions (events) that are crucial for predicting user attributes in, e.g., fraud prevention and recommendations. While self-supervised learning (SSL) effectively models the temporal order of events, it typically overlooks the global structure of the user-item interaction graph. To bridge this gap, we propose three model-agnostic strategies for integrating this structural information into contrastive SSL: enriching event embeddings, aligning client representations with graph embeddings, and adding a structural pretext task. Experiments on four financial and e-commerce datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the accuracy (up to a 2.3% AUC) and reveals that graph density is a key factor in selecting the optimal integration strategy.