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.

Balancing Accuracy and Novelty with Sub-Item Popularity

In the realm of music recommendation, sequential recommenders have shown promise in capturing the dynamic nature of music consumption. A key characteristic of this domain is repetitive listening, where users frequently replay familiar tracks. To capture these repetition patterns, recent research has introduced Personalised Popularity Scores (PPS), which quantify user-specific preferences based on historical frequency. While PPS enhances relevance in recommendation, it often reinforces already-known content, limiting the system's ability to surface novel or serendipitous items - key elements for fostering long-term user engagement and satisfaction. To address this limitation, we build upon RecJPQ, a Transformer-based framework initially developed to improve scalability in large-item catalogues through sub-item decomposition. We repurpose RecJPQ's sub-item architecture to model personalised popularity at a finer granularity. This allows us to capture shared repetition patterns across sub-embeddings - latent structures not accessible through item-level popularity alone. We propose a novel integration of sub-ID-level personalised popularity within the RecJPQ framework, enabling explicit control over the trade-off between accuracy and personalised novelty. Our sub-ID-level PPS method (sPPS) consistently outperforms item-level PPS by achieving significantly higher personalised novelty without compromising recommendation accuracy. Code and experiments are publicly available at https://github.com/sisinflab/Sub-id-Popularity.

Align-for-Fusion: Harmonizing Triple Preferences via Dual-oriented Diffusion for Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation

Personalized sequential recommendation aims to predict appropriate items for users based on their behavioral sequences. To alleviate data sparsity and interest drift issues, conventional approaches typically incorporate auxiliary behaviors from other domains via cross-domain transition. However, existing cross-domain sequential recommendation (CDSR) methods often follow an align-then-fusion paradigm that performs representation-level alignment across multiple domains and combines them mechanically for recommendation, overlooking the fine-grained fusion of domain-specific preferences. Inspired by recent advances in diffusion models (DMs) for distribution matching, we propose an align-for-fusion framework for CDSR to harmonize triple preferences via dual-oriented DMs, termed HorizonRec. Specifically, we investigate the uncertainty injection of DMs and identify stochastic noise as a key source of instability in existing DM-based recommenders. To address this, we introduce a mixed-conditioned distribution retrieval strategy that leverages distributions retrieved from users' authentic behavioral logic as semantic bridges across domains, enabling consistent multi-domain preference modeling. Furthermore, we propose a dual-oriented preference diffusion method to suppress potential noise and emphasize target-relevant interests during multi-domain user representation fusion. Extensive experiments on four CDSR datasets from two distinct platforms demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of HorizonRec in fine-grained triple-domain preference fusion.

I$^3$-MRec: Invariant Learning with Information Bottleneck for Incomplete Modality Recommendation

Multimodal recommender systems (MRS) improve recommendation performance by integrating diverse semantic information from multiple modalities. However, the assumption of the availability of all modalities rarely holds in practice due to missing images, incomplete descriptions, or inconsistent user content. These challenges significantly degrade the robustness and generalization capabilities of current models. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel method called \textbf{I$^3$-MRec}, which uses \textbf{I}nvariant learning with \textbf{I}nformation bottleneck principle for \textbf{I}ncomplete \textbf{M}odality \textbf{Rec}ommendation. To achieve robust performance in missing modality scenarios, I$^3$-MRec enforces two pivotal properties: (i) cross-modal preference invariance, which ensures consistent user preference modeling across varying modality environments, and (ii) compact yet effective modality representation, which filters out task-irrelevant modality information while maximally preserving essential features relevant to recommendation. By treating each modality as a distinct semantic environment, I$^3$-MRec employs invariant risk minimization (IRM) to learn modality-specific item representations. In parallel, a missing-aware fusion module grounded in the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle extracts compact and effective item embeddings by suppressing modality noise and preserving core user preference signals. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that I$^3$-MRec consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art MRS methods across various modality-missing scenarios, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness in practical applications. The code and processed datasets are released at https://github.com/HuilinChenJN/I3-MRec.

Transferring Expert Cognitive Models to Social Robots via Agentic Concept Bottleneck Models

Successful group meetings, such as those implemented in group behavioral-change programs, work meetings, and other social contexts, must promote individual goal setting and execution while strengthening the social relationships within the group. Consequently, an ideal facilitator must be sensitive to the subtle dynamics of disengagement, difficulties with individual goal setting and execution, and interpersonal difficulties that signal a need for intervention. The challenges and cognitive load experienced by facilitators create a critical gap for an embodied technology that can interpret social exchanges while remaining aware of the needs of the individuals in the group and providing transparent recommendations that go beyond powerful but "black box" foundation models (FMs) that identify social cues. We address this important demand with a social robot co-facilitator that analyzes multimodal meeting data and provides discreet cues to the facilitator. The robot's reasoning is powered by an agentic concept bottleneck model (CBM), which makes decisions based on human-interpretable concepts like participant engagement and sentiments, ensuring transparency and trustworthiness. Our core contribution is a transfer learning framework that distills the broad social understanding of an FM into our specialized and transparent CBM. This concept-driven system significantly outperforms direct zero-shot FMs in predicting the need for intervention and enables real-time human correction of its reasoning. Critically, we demonstrate robust knowledge transfer: the model generalizes across different groups and successfully transfers the expertise of senior human facilitators to improve the performance of novices. By transferring an expert's cognitive model into an interpretable robotic partner, our work provides a powerful blueprint for augmenting human capabilities in complex social domains.

Do Recommender Systems Really Leverage Multimodal Content? A Comprehensive Analysis on Multimodal Representations for Recommendation

Multimodal Recommender Systems aim to improve recommendation accuracy by integrating heterogeneous content, such as images and textual metadata. While effective, it remains unclear whether their gains stem from true multimodal understanding or increased model complexity. This work investigates the role of multimodal item embeddings, emphasizing the semantic informativeness of the representations. Initial experiments reveal that embeddings from standard extractors (e.g., ResNet50, Sentence-Bert) enhance performance, but rely on modality-specific encoders and ad hoc fusion strategies that lack control over cross-modal alignment. To overcome these limitations, we leverage Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to generate multimodal-by-design embeddings via structured prompts. This approach yields semantically aligned representations without requiring any fusion. Experiments across multiple settings show notable performance improvements. Furthermore, LVLMs embeddings offer a distinctive advantage: they can be decoded into structured textual descriptions, enabling direct assessment of their multimodal comprehension. When such descriptions are incorporated as side content into recommender systems, they improve recommendation performance, empirically validating the semantic depth and alignment encoded within LVLMs outputs. Our study highlights the importance of semantically rich representations and positions LVLMs as a compelling foundation for building robust and meaningful multimodal representations in recommendation tasks.

Unveiling Over-Memorization in Finetuning LLMs for Reasoning Tasks

The pretrained large language models (LLMs) are finetuned with labeled data for better instruction following ability and alignment with human values. In this paper, we study the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning on reasoning tasks and reveal the uncovered over-memorization phenomenon during a specific stage of LLM finetuning. At this stage, the LLMs have excessively memorized training data and exhibit high test perplexity while maintaining good test accuracy. We investigate the conditions that lead to LLM over-memorization and find that training epochs and large learning rates contribute to this issue. Although models with over-memorization demonstrate comparable test accuracy to normal models, they suffer from reduced robustness, poor out-of-distribution generalization, and decreased generation diversity. Our experiments unveil the over-memorization to be broadly applicable across different tasks, models, and finetuning methods. Our research highlights that overparameterized, extensively finetuned LLMs exhibit unique learning dynamics distinct from traditional machine learning models. Based on our observations of over-memorization, we provide recommendations on checkpoint and learning rate selection during finetuning.

Discrete-event Tensor Factorization: Learning a Smooth Embedding for Continuous Domains

Recommender systems learn from past user behavior to predict future user preferences. Intuitively, it has been established that the most recent interactions are more indicative of future preferences than older interactions. Many recommendation algorithms use this notion to either drop older interactions or to assign them a lower weight, so the model can focus on the more informative, recent information. However, very few approaches model the flow of time explicitly. This paper analyzes how time can be encoded in factorization-style recommendation models. By including absolute time as a feature, our models can learn varying user preferences and changing item perception over time. In addition to simple binning approaches, we also propose a novel, fully continuous time encoding mechanism. Through the use of a polynomial fit inside the loss function, our models completely avoid the need for discretization, and they are able to capture the time dimension in arbitrary resolution. We perform a comparative study on three real-world datasets that span multiple years, where long user histories are present, and items stay relevant for a longer time. Empirical results show that, by explicitly modeling time, our models are very effective at capturing temporal signals, such as varying item popularities over time. Despite this however, our experiments also indicate that a simple post-hoc popularity adjustment is often sufficient to achieve the best performance on the unseen test set. This teaches us that, for the recommendation task, predicting the future is more important than capturing past trends. As such, we argue that specialized mechanisms are needed for extrapolation to future data.

ViLLA-MMBench: A Unified Benchmark Suite for LLM-Augmented Multimodal Movie Recommendation

Recommending long-form video content demands joint modeling of visual, audio, and textual modalities, yet most benchmarks address only raw features or narrow fusion. We present ViLLA-MMBench, a reproducible, extensible benchmark for LLM-augmented multimodal movie recommendation. Built on MovieLens and MMTF-14K, it aligns dense item embeddings from three modalities: audio (block-level, i-vector), visual (CNN, AVF), and text. Missing or sparse metadata is automatically enriched using state-of-the-art LLMs (e.g., OpenAI Ada), generating high-quality synopses for thousands of movies. All text (raw or augmented) is embedded with configurable encoders (Ada, LLaMA-2, Sentence-T5), producing multiple ready-to-use sets. The pipeline supports interchangeable early-, mid-, and late-fusion (concatenation, PCA, CCA, rank-aggregation) and multiple backbones (MF, VAECF, VBPR, AMR, VMF) for ablation. Experiments are fully declarative via a single YAML file. Evaluation spans accuracy (Recall, nDCG) and beyond-accuracy metrics: cold-start rate, coverage, novelty, diversity, fairness. Results show LLM-based augmentation and strong text embeddings boost cold-start and coverage, especially when fused with audio-visual features. Systematic benchmarking reveals universal versus backbone- or metric-specific combinations. Open-source code, embeddings, and configs enable reproducible, fair multimodal RS research and advance principled generative AI integration in large-scale recommendation. Code: https://recsys-lab.github.io/ViLLA-MMBench

Benefit from Rich: Tackling Search Interaction Sparsity in Search Enhanced Recommendation

In modern online platforms, search and recommendation (S&R) often coexist, offering opportunities for performance improvement through search-enhanced approaches. Existing studies show that incorporating search signals boosts recommendation performance. However, the effectiveness of these methods relies heavily on rich search interactions. They primarily benefit a small subset of users with abundant search behavior, while offering limited improvements for the majority of users who exhibit only sparse search activity. To address the problem of sparse search data in search-enhanced recommendation, we face two key challenges: (1) how to learn useful search features for users with sparse search interactions, and (2) how to design effective training objectives under sparse conditions. Our idea is to leverage the features of users with rich search interactions to enhance those of users with sparse search interactions. Based on this idea, we propose GSERec, a method that utilizes message passing on the User-Code Graphs to alleviate data sparsity in Search-Enhanced Recommendation. Specifically, we utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) with vector quantization to generate discrete codes, which connect similar users and thereby construct the graph. Through message passing on this graph, embeddings of users with rich search data are propagated to enhance the embeddings of users with sparse interactions. To further ensure that the message passing captures meaningful information from truly similar users, we introduce a contrastive loss to better model user similarities. The enhanced user representations are then integrated into downstream search-enhanced recommendation models. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that GSERec consistently outperforms baselines, especially for users with sparse search behaviors.