OmniFashion: Towards Generalist Fashion Intelligence via Multi-Task Vision-Language Learning

Fashion intelligence spans multiple tasks, i.e., retrieval, recommendation, recognition, and dialogue, yet remains hindered by fragmented supervision and incomplete fashion annotations. These limitations jointly restrict the formation of consistent visual-semantic structures, preventing recent vision-language models (VLMs) from serving as a generalist fashion brain that unifies understanding and reasoning across tasks. Therefore, we construct FashionX, a million-scale dataset that exhaustively annotates visible fashion items within an outfit and organizes attributes from global to part-level. Built upon this foundation, we propose OmniFashion, a unified vision-language framework that bridges diverse fashion tasks under a unified fashion dialogue paradigm, enabling both multi-task reasoning and interactive dialogue. Experiments on multi-subtasks and retrieval benchmarks show that OmniFashion achieves strong task-level accuracy and cross-task generalization, highlighting its offering of a scalable path toward universal, dialogue-oriented fashion intelligence.

Sensory-Aware Sequential Recommendation via Review-Distilled Representations

We propose a novel framework for sensory-aware sequential recommendation that enriches item representations with linguistically extracted sensory attributes from product reviews. Our approach, \textsc{ASEGR} (Attribute-based Sensory Enhanced Generative Recommendation), introduces a two-stage pipeline in which a large language model is first fine-tuned as a teacher to extract structured sensory attribute--value pairs, such as \textit{color: matte black} and \textit{scent: vanilla}, from unstructured review text. The extracted structures are then distilled into a compact student transformer that produces fixed-dimensional sensory embeddings for each item. These embeddings encode experiential semantics in a reusable form and are incorporated into standard sequential recommender architectures as additional item-level representations. We evaluate our method on four Amazon domains and integrate the learned sensory embeddings into representative sequential recommendation models, including SASRec, BERT4Rec, and BSARec. Across domains, sensory-enhanced models consistently outperform their identifier-based counterparts, indicating that linguistically grounded sensory representations provide complementary signals to behavioral interaction patterns. Qualitative analysis further shows that the extracted attributes align closely with human perceptions of products, enabling interpretable connections between natural language descriptions and recommendation behavior. Overall, this work demonstrates that sensory attribute distillation offers a principled and scalable way to bridge information extraction and sequential recommendation through structured semantic representation learning.

AlphaFree: Recommendation Free from Users, IDs, and GNNs

Can we design effective recommender systems free from users, IDs, and GNNs? Recommender systems are central to personalized content delivery across domains, with top-K item recommendation being a fundamental task to retrieve the most relevant items from historical interactions. Existing methods rely on entrenched design conventions, often adopted without reconsideration, such as storing per-user embeddings (user-dependent), initializing features from raw IDs (ID-dependent), and employing graph neural networks (GNN-dependent). These dependencies incur several limitations, including high memory costs, cold-start and over-smoothing issues, and poor generalization to unseen interactions. In this work, we propose AlphaFree, a novel recommendation method free from users, IDs, and GNNs. Our main ideas are to infer preferences on-the-fly without user embeddings (user-free), replace raw IDs with language representations (LRs) from pre-trained language models (ID-free), and capture collaborative signals through augmentation with similar items and contrastive learning, without GNNs (GNN-free). Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets show that AlphaFree consistently outperforms its competitors, achieving up to around 40% improvements over non-LR-based methods and up to 5.7% improvements over LR-based methods, while significantly reducing GPU memory usage by up to 69% under high-dimensional LRs.

SafeCRS: Personalized Safety Alignment for LLM-Based Conversational Recommender Systems

Current LLM-based conversational recommender systems (CRS) primarily optimize recommendation accuracy and user satisfaction. We identify an underexplored vulnerability in which recommendation outputs may negatively impact users by violating personalized safety constraints, when individualized safety sensitivities -- such as trauma triggers, self-harm history, or phobias -- are implicitly inferred from the conversation but not respected during recommendation. We formalize this challenge as personalized CRS safety and introduce SafeRec, a new benchmark dataset designed to systematically evaluate safety risks in LLM-based CRS under user-specific constraints. To further address this problem, we propose SafeCRS, a safety-aware training framework that integrates Safe Supervised Fine-Tuning (Safe-SFT) with Safe Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization (Safe-GDPO) to jointly optimize recommendation quality and personalized safety alignment. Extensive experiments on SafeRec demonstrate that SafeCRS reduces safety violation rates by up to 96.5% relative to the strongest recommendation-quality baseline while maintaining competitive recommendation quality. Warning: This paper contains potentially harmful and offensive content.

SOLAR: SVD-Optimized Lifelong Attention for Recommendation

Attention mechanism remains the defining operator in Transformers since it provides expressive global credit assignment, yet its $O(N^2 d)$ time and memory cost in sequence length $N$ makes long-context modeling expensive and often forces truncation or other heuristics. Linear attention reduces complexity to $O(N d^2)$ by reordering computation through kernel feature maps, but this reformulation drops the softmax mechanism and shifts the attention score distribution. In recommender systems, low-rank structure in matrices is not a rare case, but rather the default inductive bias in its representation learning, particularly explicit in the user behavior sequence modeling. Leveraging this structure, we introduce SVD-Attention, which is theoretically lossless on low-rank matrices and preserves softmax while reducing attention complexity from $O(N^2 d)$ to $O(Ndr)$. With SVD-Attention, we propose SOLAR, SVD-Optimized Lifelong Attention for Recommendation, a sequence modeling framework that supports behavior sequences of ten-thousand scale and candidate sets of several thousand items in cascading process without any filtering. In Kuaishou's online recommendation scenario, SOLAR delivers a 0.68\% Video Views gain together with additional business metrics improvements.

FlashEvaluator: Expanding Search Space with Parallel Evaluation

The Generator-Evaluator (G-E) framework, i.e., evaluating K sequences from a generator and selecting the top-ranked one according to evaluator scores, is a foundational paradigm in tasks such as Recommender Systems (RecSys) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Traditional evaluators process sequences independently, suffering from two major limitations: (1) lack of explicit cross-sequence comparison, leading to suboptimal accuracy; (2) poor parallelization with linear complexity of O(K), resulting in inefficient resource utilization and negative impact on both throughput and latency. To address these challenges, we propose FlashEvaluator, which enables cross-sequence token information sharing and processes all sequences in a single forward pass. This yields sublinear computational complexity that improves the system's efficiency and supports direct inter-sequence comparisons that improve selection accuracy. The paper also provides theoretical proofs and extensive experiments on recommendation and NLP tasks, demonstrating clear advantages over conventional methods. Notably, FlashEvaluator has been deployed in online recommender system of Kuaishou, delivering substantial and sustained revenue gains in practice.

Beyond Factual Correctness: Mitigating Preference-Inconsistent Explanations in Explainable Recommendation

LLM-based explainable recommenders can produce fluent explanations that are factually correct, yet still justify items using attributes that conflict with a user's historical preferences. Such preference-inconsistent explanations yield logically valid but unconvincing reasoning and are largely missed by standard hallucination or faithfulness metrics. We formalize this failure mode and propose PURE, a preference-aware reasoning framework following a select-then-generate paradigm. Instead of only improving generation, PURE intervenes in evidence selection, it selects a compact set of multi-hop item-centric reasoning paths that are both factually grounded and aligned with user preference structure, guided by user intent, specificity, and diversity to suppress generic, weakly personalized evidence. The selected evidence is then injected into LLM generation via structure-aware prompting that preserves relational constraints. To measure preference inconsistency, we introduce a feature-level, user-centric evaluation metric that reveals misalignment overlooked by factuality-based measures. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that PURE consistently reduces preference-inconsistent explanations and factual hallucinations while maintaining competitive recommendation accuracy, explanation quality, and inference efficiency. These results highlight that trustworthy explanations require not only factual correctness but also justification aligned with user preferences.

APAO: Adaptive Prefix-Aware Optimization for Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation has recently emerged as a promising paradigm in sequential recommendation. It formulates the task as an autoregressive generation process, predicting discrete tokens of the next item conditioned on user interaction histories. Existing generative recommendation models are typically trained with token-level likelihood objectives, such as cross-entropy loss, while employing multi-step beam search during inference to generate ranked item candidates. However, this leads to a fundamental training-inference inconsistency: standard training assumes ground-truth history is always available, ignoring the fact that beam search prunes low-probability branches during inference. Consequently, the correct item may be prematurely discarded simply because its initial tokens (prefixes) have low scores. To address this issue, we propose the Adaptive Prefix-Aware Optimization (APAO) framework, which introduces prefix-level optimization losses to better align the training objective with the inference setting. Furthermore, we design an adaptive worst-prefix optimization strategy that dynamically focuses on the most vulnerable prefixes during training, thereby enhancing the model's ability to retain correct candidates under beam search constraints. We provide theoretical analyses to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets further show that APAO consistently alleviates the training-inference inconsistency and improves performance across various generative recommendation backbones. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/yuyq18/APAO.

The Science Data Lake: A Unified Open Infrastructure Integrating 293 Million Papers Across Eight Scholarly Sources with Embedding-Based Ontology Alignment

Scholarly data are largely fragmented across siloed databases with divergent metadata and missing linkages among them. We present the Science Data Lake, a locally-deployable infrastructure built on DuckDB and simple Parquet files that unifies eight open sources - Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, SciSciNet, Papers with Code, Retraction Watch, Reliance on Science, a preprint-to-published mapping, and Crossref - via DOI normalization while preserving source-level schemas. The resource comprises approximately 960GB of Parquet files spanning ~293 million uniquely identifiable papers across ~22 schemas and ~153 SQL views. An embedding-based ontology alignment using BGE-large sentence embeddings maps 4,516 OpenAlex topics to 13 scientific ontologies (~1.3 million terms), yielding 16,150 mappings covering 99.8% of topics ($\geq 0.65$ threshold) with $F1 = 0.77$ at the recommended $\geq 0.85$ operating point, outperforming TF-IDF, BM25, and Jaro-Winkler baselines on a 300-pair gold-standard evaluation. We validate through 10 automated checks, cross-source citation agreement analysis (pairwise Pearson $r = 0.76$ - $0.87$), and stratified manual annotation. Four vignettes demonstrate cross-source analyses infeasible with any single database. The resource is open source, deployable on a single drive or queryable remotely via HuggingFace, and includes structured documentation suitable for large language model (LLM) based research agents.

Information Routing in Atomistic Foundation Models: How Equivariance Creates Linearly Disentangled Representations

What do atomistic foundation models encode in their intermediate representations, and how is that information organized? We introduce Composition Projection Decomposition (CPD), which uses QR projection to linearly remove composition signal from learned representations and probes the geometric residual. Across eight models from five architectural families on QM9 molecules and Materials Project crystals, we find a disentanglement gradient: tensor product equivariant architectures (MACE) produce representations where geometry is almost fully linearly accessible after composition removal ($R^2_{\text{geom}} = 0.782$ for HOMO-LUMO gap), while handcrafted descriptors (ANI-2x) entangle the same information nonlinearly ($R^2_{\text{geom}} = -0.792$ under Ridge; $R^2 = +0.784$ under MLP). MACE routes target-specific signal through irreducible representation channels -- dipole to $L = 1$, HOMO-LUMO gap to $L = 0$ -- a pattern not observed in ViSNet's vector-scalar architecture under the same probe. We show that gradient boosted tree probes on projected residuals are systematically inflated, recovering $R^2 = 0.68$--$0.95$ on a purely compositional target, and recommend linear probes as the primary metric. Linearly disentangled representations are more sample-efficient under linear probing, suggesting a practical advantage for equivariant architectures beyond raw prediction accuracy.