UniSkill: A Dataset for Matching University Curricula to Professional Competencies

Skill extraction and recommendation systems have been studied from recruiter, applicant, and education perspectives. While AI applications in job advertisements have received broad attention, deficiencies in the instructed skills side remain a challenge. In this work, we address the scarcity of publicly available datasets by releasing both manually annotated and synthetic datasets of skills from the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) taxonomy and university course pairs and publishing corresponding annotation guidelines. Specifically, we match graduate-level university courses with skills from the Systems Analysts and Management and Organization Analyst ESCO occupation groups at two granularities: course title with a skill, and course sentence with a skill. We train language models on this dataset to serve as a baseline for retrieval and recommendation systems for course-to-skill and skill-to-course matching. We evaluate the models on a portion of the annotated data. Our BERT model achieves 87% F1-score, showing that course and skill matching is a feasible task.

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.

Proactive Guiding Strategy for Item-side Fairness in Interactive Recommendation

Item-side fairness is crucial for ensuring the fair exposure of long-tail items in interactive recommender systems. Existing approaches promote the exposure of long-tail items by directly incorporating them into recommended results. This causes misalignment between user preferences and the recommended long-tail items, which hinders long-term user engagement and reduces the effectiveness of recommendations. We aim for a proactive fairness-guiding strategy, which actively guides user preferences toward long-tail items while preserving user satisfaction during the interactive recommendation process. To this end, we propose HRL4PFG, an interactive recommendation framework that leverages hierarchical reinforcement learning to guide user preferences toward long-tail items progressively. HRL4PFG operates through a macro-level process that generates fairness-guided targets based on multi-step feedback, and a micro-level process that fine-tunes recommendations in real time according to both these targets and evolving user preferences. Extensive experiments show that HRL4PFG improves cumulative interaction rewards and maximum user interaction length by a larger margin when compared with state-of-the-art methods in interactive recommendation environments.

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.

S2CDR: Smoothing-Sharpening Process Model for Cross-Domain Recommendation

User cold-start problem is a long-standing challenge in recommendation systems. Fortunately, cross-domain recommendation (CDR) has emerged as a highly effective remedy for the user cold-start challenge, with recently developed diffusion models (DMs) demonstrating exceptional performance. However, these DMs-based CDR methods focus on dealing with user-item interactions, overlooking correlations between items across the source and target domains. Meanwhile, the Gaussian noise added in the forward process of diffusion models would hurt user's personalized preference, leading to the difficulty in transferring user preference across domains. To this end, we propose a novel paradigm of Smoothing-Sharpening Process Model for CDR to cold-start users, termed as S2CDR which features a corruption-recovery architecture and is solved with respect to ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Specifically, the smoothing process gradually corrupts the original user-item/item-item interaction matrices derived from both domains into smoothed preference signals in a noise-free manner, and the sharpening process iteratively sharpens the preference signals to recover the unknown interactions for cold-start users. Wherein, for the smoothing process, we introduce the heat equation on the item-item similarity graph to better capture the correlations between items across domains, and further build the tailor-designed low-pass filter to filter out the high-frequency noise information for capturing user's intrinsic preference, in accordance with the graph signal processing (GSP) theory. Extensive experiments on three real-world CDR scenarios confirm that our S2CDR significantly outperforms previous SOTA methods in a training-free manner.

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.

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.

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.

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.