From Head to Tail: Asymmetric Knowledge Transfer in Long-tail Recommendation with Generative Semantic IDs

Long-tail recommendation in real-world e-commerce platforms remains challenging due to severe data imbalance. Existing methods often struggle to combine content-based multimodal features with collaborative signals. Many of these methods also ignore an important asymmetry in knowledge transfer between head and tail IDs: noisy signals from tail IDs can hurt representation learning for head IDs. This paper presents AKT-Rec, a framework for Asymmetric Knowledge Transfer in long-tail Recommendation that uses LLM-generated semantic IDs. AKT-Rec uses Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with supervised fine-tuning to align content representations with collaborative information for both items and users, producing semantic representations. It then discretizes these representations into semantic IDs with a Residual-Quantized VAE (RQ-VAE), which yields semantic clusters of similar entities. AKT-Rec has two main components: (1) Cluster-Guided Adaptive Embedding, which decomposes each ID representation into a cluster-level embedding that captures shared semantics and an individual embedding. Through an asymmetric contrastive objective and an activity-aware gating mechanism, this module directs knowledge transfer from head to tail IDs. (2) Hierarchical Feature Aggregation, which builds parallel feature views and adaptively fuses them to optimize predictions for samples with varying activity levels. Extensive experiments on a large-scale industrial dataset and online A/B testing on the Alibaba Tmall platform demonstrate the effectiveness of AKT-Rec. AKT-Rec improves offline performance by 0.35% in AUC and 1.53% in GAUC, outperforming several competitive baselines. In online A/B testing, AKT-Rec achieves a 2.76% increase in CTR and a 3.47% increase in GMV, validating its utility in real-world production environments.

Enhancing Deep Neural Network Reliability with Refinement and Calibration

Although deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve high predictive accuracy, their confidence estimates are often unreliable, potentially compromising user trust in their decisions. This has motivated research on calibrated models, where calibration measures how well a model's predicted confidence aligns with the empirical probability of correctness. However, calibration metrics can often be improved through post-processing techniques that merely mimic training-time uncertainty without genuinely improving the model's understanding. For this reason, statisticians recommend that models be not only calibrated but also refined. Intuitively, a model is considered more refined if it assigns significantly different confidence scores to correct and incorrect predictions, a property also referred to as sharpness. We observe that many existing calibration methods improve calibration at the cost of reduced refinement. To address this limitation, we propose: (1) a novel loss function that explicitly promotes refinement and can be optimized through supervised contrastive learning; and (2) a unified training framework, RefCal, that jointly optimizes calibration, refinement, and accuracy to improve DNN reliability. On the CIFAR-100-LT dataset with 10 percent class imbalance, RefCal achieves (accuracy, refinement, ECE) of (58.81, 95.67, 0.08), substantially outperforming the widely used Correctness Ranking Loss, which achieves (46.27, 93.7, 0.22).

Ocean4Rec: Offline LLM-Derived OCEAN Profiles for Request-Time VOD Reranking

Industrial video-on-demand (VOD) recommenders need richer content understanding, but LLM-as-reranker designs repeat prompt construction, token generation, model invocation, output parsing, and fallback handling for each request. In high-volume latency-sensitive services, these request-time operations complicate throughput planning, tail-latency control, capacity isolation, and predictable operation. This paper presents Ocean4Rec, a reranking layer that uses an LLM only offline to materialize item OCEAN profiles from content metadata. Items are mapped into Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism scores, while user profiles are built by time-decayed aggregation of recently clicked and deep-linked items in the same five-dimensional space. At request time, Ocean4Rec joins precomputed item profiles, user profiles, base recommender scores, and catalog recency, then performs numeric reranking without an LLM call. On anonymized Samsung Smart TV VOD logs, same-candidate Top1000 temporal-holdout offline evaluations show that Ocean4Rec improves NDCG@20 over a stronger non-OCEAN Base+Recency ordering by 7.6% for an NCF generator and 61.5% for a LightGCN generator. HR@20 is inconclusive for NCF and improves by 67.3% for LightGCN, reflecting sparse exact-item replay labels and the strength of recency as an industrial baseline. The result should be read as offline replay evidence for a bounded auxiliary content-taste feature that preserves the deployability advantage of a request-time-LLM-free serving path.

Same Ranking, Different Winner: How Scoring Targets Shape LLM Memory Benchmarks

Conversational-memory systems increasingly transform dialogue history into facts, summaries, timelines, and other source-linked descendants, so a single source turn can coexist with several derived memories in the same retrieval index. This raises an underspecified evaluation question: which stored form should receive retrieval credit? We show that this scoring-target choice is often left implicit and can materially change benchmark conclusions. We present TIAP, a fixed-output audit that rescores saved ranked outputs under three targets -- Raw, Source, and Canonical -- without rerunning retrieval. On LoCoMo and LongMemEval-S, switching only the credited target changes nDCG on 83.4--94.0 percent of shared queries, flips target orderings on Mem0 and MemoryOS transfer runs, and reverses parser-density recommendations. A 1,902-case semantic audit further shows that relaxed source-linked credit is fully justified only 29.2 percent of the time, despite high rubric reliability in a validation subset. These results reveal target noninvariance: conclusions about memory architectures can silently flip with a single benchmark-design choice. Conversational-memory papers should therefore define and report the scoring target explicitly.

Memento: Personalized RAG-Style Long-Retention Data Scaling for META Ads Recommendation

Modeling of long history data suffers from long-context window attention dilution, system efficiency and catastrophic forgetting problems, where naive linear scaling approach like LastN would fail. We introduce Memento, a personalized retrieval-augmented framework that treats historical user engagements as a document corpus and ad requests as queries, retrieving relevant interactions via Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) to balance similarity with diversity. We identify two complementary applications: Representation Memento, which retrieves historical embeddings for feature augmentation, and Data Memento, which retrieves past training examples for multipass training. Through infrastructure co-design -- temporal chunking, INT8 quantization, and asynchronous serving -- Memento achieves 5-10$\times$ resource efficiency over linear scaling. Memento processes daily requests with sub-10ms latency, yielding 0.25-0.3% Normalized Entropy gain on both click-through and conversion prediction. In production, Memento delivers a 1% CTR lift on Facebook Feed and Reels and a 1.2% CVR lift, scaling personalization to 365+ days of history.

Expand More, Shrink Less: Shaping Effective-Rank Dynamics for Dense Scaling in Recommendation

Scaling recommendation models is a central challenge in recommender systems. Recently, RankMixer has emerged as an effective solution, operating on a unified token representation and alternating between token mixing and per-token feedforward networks (P-FFNs) to achieve scalable performance. However, RankMixer suffers from \textit{embedding collapse}, where learned representations have low effective rank, limiting expressivity and underutilizing the expanded representation space. Through empirical analysis and theoretical insights, we identify rigid token mixing and P-FFN modules as the primary causes of this phenomenon, jointly inducing a \textbf{damped oscillatory trajectory} in effective-rank evolution across layers. To address it, we propose RankElastor, a novel architecture that produces spectrum-robust representations with provable collapse mitigation. RankElastor introduces two components: (i) \textbf{parameterized full mixing}, which enables expressive token mixing with improved spectral robustness; and (ii) \textbf{GLU-improved P-FFNs}, which stabilize representation spectra through GLU-style FFN modules. Extensive experiments on large-scale industrial datasets demonstrate that RankElastor consistently improves recommendation performance, mitigates embedding collapse, and exhibits robust scaling behavior. Code is available at this GitHub repository: https://github.com/vasile-paskardlgm/RankElastor

Rethinking Noise-Robust Training for Frozen Vision Foundation Models: A Cross-Dataset Benchmark with a Case Study of Small-Loss Failure

Frozen Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with lightweight classification heads are increasingly used in medical imaging because they offer efficient and reproducible deployment. Yet noisy-label learning methods for this frozen-feature regime remain poorly understood, and most existing methods still rely on a small-loss assumption inherited from end-to-end training. We present a controlled benchmark of eight noisy-label methods across five medical datasets, three backbones, two noise types, and five noise rates (150 conditions, 6,000 training runs), evaluated with balanced accuracy. The benchmark shows that there is no universal winner: Friedman ranking over the 150 conditions yields $χ^2 = 333.2$ ($p = 4.77 \times 10^{-68}$), ELR wins the most conditions (49/150), while CUFIT attains the best mean rank (2.51). The practical cost of method choice grows sharply with noise severity, from 4.5pp on clean data to 18.8pp at asymmetric 40\% noise. To explain these benchmark-level patterns, we revisit the small-loss assumption in a representative high-risk regime. Under frozen DINOv2 features, clean and noisy loss distributions overlap by 53--61\%, and matched-rate clean-sample detection shows that prediction agreement is markedly more stable than loss ranking under asymmetric noise (3pp vs.\ 13pp precision drop). On ISIC2019 with asymmetric 40\% noise, Co-Teaching reaches 68\% overall accuracy while collapsing to 35.1\% balanced accuracy with zero recall on three minority classes. Together, these results recast noisy-label learning for frozen VFMs as a regime-aware method-selection problem rather than a search for a single dominant algorithm. We conclude with evidence-based guidance and a low-regret feature-space selector for practical recommendation.

Behavior-Guided Candidate Calibration for Multimodal Recommendation

Multimodal recommendation benefits from content signals, but the gain depends on how those signals interact with the ranking pipeline. We find that moderate cross-view agreement helps, while stronger agreement suppresses recommendation-specific variation. Spectral analysis shows a clear split: low-frequency components capture shared structure, and higher-frequency components preserve more discriminative signal. Based on this finding, we introduce a behavior-guided candidate calibration model that converts training-only co-user overlap into signed candidate evidence and applies it only to the shortlist produced by the multimodal backbone. The backbone keeps the representation space stable; behavior evidence acts only where ranking is decided. Results on Amazon Baby, Sports, and Electronics show consistent gains over strong multimodal baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/LIZESHENG13/bridge.

LLM Retrieval for Stable and Predictable Ad Recommendations

Traditional ads recommendation systems have primarily focused on optimizing for prediction accuracy of click or conversion events using canonical metrics such as recall or normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG). With the hyper-growth of ads inventory and liquidity with generative AI technologies, the prediction stability and predictability is becoming increasingly critical. Intuitively, prediction stability and predictability can be defined to quantify system robustness with respect to minor/noisy input (ads, creatives) perturbations, the lack of which could lead to advertiser perceivable problems such as repeatability, cold start and under-exploration. In this paper, we introduce a new evaluation framework for quantifying stability and predictability of an ads recommender system, and present an online validated semantic candidate generation framework powered by fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) that showed significant improvement along these metrics by fundamentally improving the semantic-awareness of the system. The approach extracts hierarchical semantic attributes from ad creatives to obtain LLM representations, which serve as the foundation for graph-based expansion, ensuring the retrieved candidates encapsulate semantic variants of an ad, guaranteeing that small creative variants from the advertiser yield consistent and explainable delivery results to the user. We tested this LLM ads retrieval framework in a large-scale industrial ads recommendation system, demonstrating significant improvements across offline and online A/B experiments, showcasing gains in both predictability and traditional performance metrics. Although evaluated in the ads stack, this is a general framework that can be applied broadly to any large-scale recommendation and retrieval systems facing similar scaling and predictability challenges.

Reinforced Preference Optimization for Reasoning-Augmented Recommendations

Recommender systems are critical for delivering personalized content across digital platforms, and recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to enhance them with richer world knowledge and explicit reasoning capabilities. With the help of reasoning knowledge, recommendations can better infer users' underlying intents, adapt to evolving preferences, and leverage semantic relationships for improved accuracy and interpretability. However, existing reasoning-based recommendation methods often fail to fully align the LLM's reasoning process with recommendation-specific objectives due to structural disruption during integration and difficulties in translating free-form generation into accurate item predictions. In this paper, we introduce RPORec, a reinforced preference optimization framework that unifies an LLM backbone's reasoning ability with a dedicated recommendation head (Rechead) for precise item retrieval. RPORec comprises two stages: (1) Reasoning-Augmented Recommendation Modeling, where high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is generated and used as auxiliary knowledge to guide the Rechead in learning recommendation-specific representations; and (2) Advanced Reasoning Refinement and Alignment, in which the trained Rechead produces verifiable rewards to fine-tune the LLM backbone via reinforcement learning, enhancing reasoning quality, structural consistency, and task relevance. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and large-scale online deployments show that RPORec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based recommendation methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of reasoning-augmented recommendation modeling in real-world systems.