Supporting Migration Policies with Forecasts: Illegal Border Crossings in Europe through a Mixed Approach

This paper presents a mixed-methodology to forecast illegal border crossings in Europe across five key migratory routes, with a one-year time horizon. The methodology integrates machine learning techniques with qualitative insights from migration experts. This approach aims at improving the predictive capacity of data-driven models through the inclusion of a human-assessed covariate, an innovation that addresses challenges posed by sudden shifts in migration patterns and limitations in traditional datasets. The proposed methodology responds directly to the forecasting needs outlined in the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, supporting the Asylum and Migration Management Regulation (AMMR). It is designed to provide policy-relevant forecasts that inform strategic decisions, early warning systems, and solidarity mechanisms among EU Member States. By joining data-driven modeling with expert judgment, this work aligns with existing academic recommendations and introduces a novel operational tool tailored for EU migration governance. The methodology is tested and validated with known data to demonstrate its applicability and reliability in migration-related policy context.

Are Large Language Models Really Effective for Training-Free Cold-Start Recommendation?

Recommender systems usually rely on large-scale interaction data to learn from users' past behaviors and make accurate predictions. However, real-world applications often face situations where no training data is available, such as when launching new services or handling entirely new users. In such cases, conventional approaches cannot be applied. This study focuses on training-free recommendation, where no task-specific training is performed, and particularly on \textit{training-free cold-start recommendation} (TFCSR), the more challenging case where the target user has no interactions. Large language models (LLMs) have recently been explored as a promising solution, and numerous studies have been proposed. As the ability of text embedding models (TEMs) increases, they are increasingly recognized as applicable to training-free recommendation, but no prior work has directly compared LLMs and TEMs under identical conditions. We present the first controlled experiments that systematically evaluate these two approaches in the same setting. The results show that TEMs outperform LLM rerankers, and this trend holds not only in cold-start settings but also in warm-start settings with rich interactions. These findings indicate that direct LLM ranking is not the only viable option, contrary to the commonly shared belief, and TEM-based approaches provide a stronger and more scalable basis for training-free recommendation.

LLM-based Personalized Portfolio Recommender: Integrating Large Language Models and Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Investment Strategy Optimization

In modern financial markets, investors increasingly seek personalized and adaptive portfolio strategies that reflect their individual risk preferences and respond to dynamic market conditions. Traditional rule-based or static optimization approaches often fail to capture the nonlinear interactions among investor behavior, market volatility, and evolving financial objectives. To address these limitations, this paper introduces the LLM-based Personalized Portfolio Recommender , an integrated framework that combines Large Language Models, reinforcement learning, and individualized risk preference modeling to support intelligent investment decision-making.

Interference Mitigation Recommender System using U-Net Autoencoders

Building on the previous work on interference mitigation, this paper introduces a modular recommender system that automatically selects the most effective interference mitigation strategy based on the interference characteristics present in the received signal. The system integrates three key stages: an SPS classifier module, a SIR predictor, and a bank of specialized U-Net autoencoders designed for different interference conditions. The classification block identifies the parameters required for cancellation. The recommender then directs the signal to the appropriate mitigation model, optionally incorporating SIR-based decisions for scenarios where successive interference cancellation may be advantageous. Experiments conducted across diverse SIR levels and modulation environments show that the recommender strategy improves robustness and reduces BER compared to using any single mitigation method alone. The results demonstrate the potential of adaptive, model-selective architectures to enhance interference resilience in dynamic communication environments.

BLADE: A Behavior-Level Data Augmentation Framework with Dual Fusion Modeling for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation

Multi-behavior sequential recommendation aims to capture users' dynamic interests by modeling diverse types of user interactions over time. Although several studies have explored this setting, the recommendation performance remains suboptimal, mainly due to two fundamental challenges: the heterogeneity of user behaviors and data sparsity. To address these challenges, we propose BLADE, a framework that enhances multi-behavior modeling while mitigating data sparsity. Specifically, to handle behavior heterogeneity, we introduce a dual item-behavior fusion architecture that incorporates behavior information at both the input and intermediate levels, enabling preference modeling from multiple perspectives. To mitigate data sparsity, we design three behavior-level data augmentation methods that operate directly on behavior sequences rather than core item sequences. These methods generate diverse augmented views while preserving the semantic consistency of item sequences. These augmented views further enhance representation learning and generalization via contrastive learning. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Toward Agentic Environments: GenAI and the Convergence of AI, Sustainability, and Human-Centric Spaces

In recent years, advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs), have made human-computer interactions more frequent, efficient, and accessible across sectors ranging from banking to healthcare. AI tools embedded in digital devices support decision-making and operational management at both individual and organizational levels, including resource allocation, workflow automation, and real-time data analysis. However, the prevailing cloud-centric deployment of AI carries a substantial environmental footprint due to high computational demands. In this context, this paper introduces the concept of agentic environments, a sustainability-oriented AI framework that extends beyond reactive systems by leveraging GenAI, multi-agent systems, and edge computing to reduce the environmental impact of technology. Agentic environments enable more efficient resource use, improved quality of life, and sustainability-by-design, while simultaneously enhancing data privacy through decentralized, edge-driven solutions. Drawing on secondary research as well as primary data from focus groups and semi-structured interviews with AI professionals from leading technology companies, the paper proposes a conceptual framework for agentic environments examined through three lenses: the personal sphere, professional and commercial use, and urban operations. The findings highlight the potential of agentic environments to foster sustainable ecosystems through optimized resource utilization and strengthened data privacy. The study concludes with recommendations for edge-driven deployment models to reduce reliance on energy-intensive cloud infrastructures.

Automated Information Flow Selection for Multi-scenario Multi-task Recommendation

Multi-scenario multi-task recommendation (MSMTR) systems must address recommendation demands across diverse scenarios while simultaneously optimizing multiple objectives, such as click-through rate and conversion rate. Existing MSMTR models typically consist of four information units: scenario-shared, scenario-specific, task-shared, and task-specific networks. These units interact to generate four types of relationship information flows, directed from scenario-shared or scenario-specific networks to task-shared or task-specific networks. However, these models face two main limitations: 1) They often rely on complex architectures, such as mixture-of-experts (MoE) networks, which increase the complexity of information fusion, model size, and training cost. 2) They extract all available information flows without filtering out irrelevant or even harmful content, introducing potential noise. Regarding these challenges, we propose a lightweight Automated Information Flow Selection (AutoIFS) framework for MSMTR. To tackle the first issue, AutoIFS incorporates low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to decouple the four information units, enabling more flexible and efficient information fusion with minimal parameter overhead. To address the second issue, AutoIFS introduces an information flow selection network that automatically filters out invalid scenario-task information flows based on model performance feedback. It employs a simple yet effective pruning function to eliminate useless information flows, thereby enhancing the impact of key relationships and improving model performance. Finally, we evaluate AutoIFS and confirm its effectiveness through extensive experiments on two public benchmark datasets and an online A/B test.

MedInsightBench: Evaluating Medical Analytics Agents Through Multi-Step Insight Discovery in Multimodal Medical Data

In medical data analysis, extracting deep insights from complex, multi-modal datasets is essential for improving patient care, increasing diagnostic accuracy, and optimizing healthcare operations. However, there is currently a lack of high-quality datasets specifically designed to evaluate the ability of large multi-modal models (LMMs) to discover medical insights. In this paper, we introduce MedInsightBench, the first benchmark that comprises 332 carefully curated medical cases, each annotated with thoughtfully designed insights. This benchmark is intended to evaluate the ability of LMMs and agent frameworks to analyze multi-modal medical image data, including posing relevant questions, interpreting complex findings, and synthesizing actionable insights and recommendations. Our analysis indicates that existing LMMs exhibit limited performance on MedInsightBench, which is primarily attributed to their challenges in extracting multi-step, deep insights and the absence of medical expertise. Therefore, we propose MedInsightAgent, an automated agent framework for medical data analysis, composed of three modules: Visual Root Finder, Analytical Insight Agent, and Follow-up Question Composer. Experiments on MedInsightBench highlight pervasive challenges and demonstrate that MedInsightAgent can improve the performance of general LMMs in medical data insight discovery.

A Simple and Effective Framework for Symmetric Consistent Indexing in Large-Scale Dense Retrieval

Dense retrieval has become the industry standard in large-scale information retrieval systems due to its high efficiency and competitive accuracy. Its core relies on a coarse-to-fine hierarchical architecture that enables rapid candidate selection and precise semantic matching, achieving millisecond-level response over billion-scale corpora. This capability makes it essential not only in traditional search and recommendation scenarios but also in the emerging paradigm of generative recommendation driven by large language models, where semantic IDs-themselves a form of coarse-to-fine representation-play a foundational role. However, the widely adopted dual-tower encoding architecture introduces inherent challenges, primarily representational space misalignment and retrieval index inconsistency, which degrade matching accuracy, retrieval stability, and performance on long-tail queries. These issues are further magnified in semantic ID generation, ultimately limiting the performance ceiling of downstream generative models. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a simple and effective framework named SCI comprising two synergistic modules: a symmetric representation alignment module that employs an innovative input-swapping mechanism to unify the dual-tower representation space without adding parameters, and an consistent indexing with dual-tower synergy module that redesigns retrieval paths using a dual-view indexing strategy to maintain consistency from training to inference. The framework is systematic, lightweight, and engineering-friendly, requiring minimal overhead while fully supporting billion-scale deployment. We provide theoretical guarantees for our approach, with its effectiveness validated by results across public datasets and real-world e-commerce datasets.

Do Reviews Matter for Recommendations in the Era of Large Language Models?

With the advent of large language models (LLMs), the landscape of recommender systems is undergoing a significant transformation. Traditionally, user reviews have served as a critical source of rich, contextual information for enhancing recommendation quality. However, as LLMs demonstrate an unprecedented ability to understand and generate human-like text, this raises the question of whether explicit user reviews remain essential in the era of LLMs. In this paper, we provide a systematic investigation of the evolving role of text reviews in recommendation by comparing deep learning methods and LLM approaches. Particularly, we conduct extensive experiments on eight public datasets with LLMs and evaluate their performance in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning scenarios. We further introduce a benchmarking evaluation framework for review-aware recommender systems, RAREval, to comprehensively assess the contribution of textual reviews to the recommendation performance of review-aware recommender systems. Our framework examines various scenarios, including the removal of some or all textual reviews, random distortion, as well as recommendation performance in data sparsity and cold-start user settings. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs are capable of functioning as effective review-aware recommendation engines, generally outperforming traditional deep learning approaches, particularly in scenarios characterized by data sparsity and cold-start conditions. In addition, the removal of some or all textual reviews and random distortion does not necessarily lead to declines in recommendation accuracy. These findings motivate a rethinking of how user preference from text reviews can be more effectively leveraged. All code and supplementary materials are available at: https://github.com/zhytk/RAREval-data-processing.