ANCHOR: Agentic Noise Creation Framework for Human Simulation and Denoising Recommendation

Distilling accurate user preferences from noisy implicit feedback remains a fundamental bottleneck in recommendation systems, highlighting the need for recommendation denoising. However, real-world data lack explicit noise annotations, forcing existing methods to rely on unsupervised side information or handcrafted heuristics. These approaches often incur high external costs, generalize poorly, or depend on unreliable priors, causing noise misidentification and corrupting true user preference representations. To address these limitations, we propose a paradigm-level reformulation of recommendation denoising. Instead of indirectly inferring noisy interactions through heuristics, our Creation-Recognition paradigm proactively creates labeled noisy interactions and trains a dedicated recognizer to identify them, transforming denoising from heuristic filtering into supervised learning. Based on this paradigm, we present ANCHOR, an agent-based framework inspired by recent LLM-as-User research. ANCHOR simulates user behaviors to generate realistic noise labels and enables supervised denoising through two stages: noise creation and noise recognition. In the noise creation stage, ANCHOR adopts a recommender-in-the-loop agentic architecture to synthesize both diverse out-of-preference noise and informative boundary-adjacent noise. For out-of-preference noise, it implements five extensible simulation mechanisms to approximate major sources of noisy implicit feedback. For boundary-adjacent noise, an adversarial boundary refinement mechanism generates ambiguous interactions that challenge the recognizer and target the decision boundary. In the noise recognition stage, ANCHOR leverages the generated labels to train a reusable parametric recognizer that integrates collaborative signals and semantic representations to detect noise patterns in real interaction data.

The End of Software Engineering: How AI Agents Are Fundamentally Restructuring the Software Paradigm

For over half a century, software engineering has operated on a foundational premise: human engineers decompose problems, encode decision logic into static code, and manually adapt that code as requirements evolve. This paper argues that the emergence of AI agents -- systems where large language models serve as the primary reasoning engine, dynamically generating and discarding code as an instrumental resource -- constitutes not an incremental improvement but a fundamental restructuring of the software paradigm. Drawing on first-principles analysis of complexity scaling, we formalize the distinction between traditional software (where code is the carrier of decision logic) and agentic systems (where code is ephemeral tooling for an LLM-driven reasoning loop). We trace the historical arc from licensed software to SaaS to what we term Agent-as-a-Service (AaaS), showing that each shift transferred additional complexity away from end-users. We introduce the concept of Agentic Engineering as an emergent discipline -- distinct from software engineering in its core object of study, control model, and human role. Through analysis of recent benchmark evidence including SWE-bench Verified, EvoClaw, and LangChain's multi-agent coordination studies, we demonstrate both the transformative potential of the agentic paradigm and its current limitations. We conclude with a four-stage roadmap toward self-evolving agent ecosystems and concrete recommendations for practitioners navigating this transition.

MS-DKC: A Dataset Knowledge Card Framework for Designing and Adapting Medical Image Segmentation Models

Medical image segmentation is often framed as a search for stronger architectures, but this can obscure a more fundamental question: what does the dataset require from the model? In medical imaging, this requirement is shaped by foreground occupancy, morphology, boundary ambiguity, topology sensitivity, annotation quality, acquisition variation, and operating point. This paper introduces the Medical Segmentation Dataset Knowledge Card (MS-DKC), a framework for making these factors explicit. MS-DKC records dataset evidence through image/acquisition, morphology, supervision, context-dependence, and deployment-risk descriptors. These descriptors are mapped to failure modes, design priors, and risk-aligned criteria, making segmentation design more traceable than architecture-first comparison. We evaluate MS-DKC on DRIVE, ISIC2018, and ACDC, representing distinct regimes. DRIVE contains sparse, thin, branching vessels, favoring detail-preserving models, sensitivity-aware optimization, threshold analysis, and topology-aware metrics. DKC-TNet-v2 achieved Dice 0.8044 and IoU 0.6730 with 35103 parameters, while SA-UNetv2-DKC-AmbRef reached Dice 0.8141, IoU 0.6865, sensitivity 0.8265, specificity 0.9804, and AUC 0.9853. ISIC2018 involves compact but appearance-variable lesions; validation-constrained score-function selection on Att-Next-Topo/ATTNext produced MS-DKC-AttNextTopo-VCSF-NoAug with Dice 0.8872, IoU 0.8214, precision 0.9173, Boundary F1 0.4878, and ASSD 4.13, while plausible additions failed to improve the risk-aligned profile. ACDC provides a multi-class cardiac case, where MS-DKC recommends four-class softmax segmentation, class-balanced Dice/CE supervision, and class-wise surface evaluation. Overall, the results support dataset-conditioned design: different datasets require different priors, operating points, and evidence before a model can be judged appropriate.

Agent Memory: Characterization and System Implications of Stateful Long-Horizon Workloads

LLM agents are increasingly deployed on long-horizon tasks requiring sustained reasoning over extended interaction histories. Realizing this at scale requires agents to persistently store, retrieve, and update their own memory across sessions. A rich ecosystem of agent memory systems has emerged spanning flat retrieval, LLM-mediated extraction, consolidating fact stores, and agentic control flows. Yet, their system-level behavior remains uncharacterized. We present the first systems characterization of agent memory. First, we introduce a system-oriented taxonomy classifying agent memory systems along four axes. Second, we build a phase-aware profiling harness attributing cost to construction, retrieval, and generation. Third, we characterize ten representative systems across two benchmark suites, uncovering how design choices shift cost across the write and read paths. Finally, we derive 10 system recommendations covering construction scheduling, capability floors, amortization via query volume, freshness-latency tradeoffs, and fleet-scale management.

Personal AI Agent for Camera Roll VQA

We study the personal camera roll visual question answering setting. In this setting, a conversational AI assistant can access a user's personal camera roll and retrieve relevant photos to answer queries, ranging from simple factual questions (e.g., ``Name of the food I tried yesterday?'') to more open-ended ones (e.g., ``Recommend some dishes I have never eaten before''). Given the vast nature of the personal camera roll (i.e., multiple years, hundreds to thousands of photos), a successful AI assistant needs to understand a long-horizon, highly personalized visual content stream in order to navigate and locate the correct and/or relevant information. To support this, we collect and manually annotate questions that mimic real-world usage. The final dataset, camroll, contains 50 users, 31,476 images, and 2,500 QA pairs. We further design camroll-agent, a conversational AI agent equipped with hierarchical memory and a minimal set of tools for efficient navigation over large, personalized visual memory. Experimental results show that camroll-agent outperforms numerous baselines and methods for long-context understanding AI agents system. Together, the camroll dataset and camroll-agent highlight the gap in AI agents' long-context reasoning: personalized visual memory requires different approaches from standard long-context textual memory, especially when consistency, visual details, and user-specific context are present.

Dual-Stream MLP is All You Need for CTR Prediction

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction holds a pivotal role in online advertising and recommendation systems, where even small improvements can significantly boost revenue. Existing research primarily focuses on designing dual-stream architectures to capture effective complex feature interactions from both explicit and implicit perspectives. However, these approaches are faced with two major challenges: 1) the high complexity of feature interaction learning, which increases computational demands and the overfitting risk, and 2) the imbalance between explicit and implicit modules, where one module's output may dominate the final prediction. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose Dual-Stream MLP (DS-MLP), a novel feature interaction framework for the CTR prediction task. Specially, it leverages knowledge distillation to consolidate the capacity of learning explicit feature interaction into a main MLP network, while a parallel MLP simultaneously captures implicit feature interactions as a complement. To effectively optimize the dual-stream MLP architecture, we further design a specific learning approach with two alignment strategies for enhancing the compatibility of the two MLP components. Experiments demonstrate that DS-MLP, though merely a vanilla MLP structure (the final model), can achieve state-of-the-art performance across three widely used benchmarks, offering a scalable and efficient solution for large-scale recommendation systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/DS-MLP.

Rethinking Sales Lead Scoring with LLM-based Hierarchical Preference Ranking

Sales lead conversion in high-stakes domains (e.g., automotive, real estate) differs fundamentally from e-commerce recommendation due to prolonged decision cycles and multi-stage funnels. Traditional lead scoring methods rule-based scorecards, machine learning, or pointwise CTR models face severe challenges: sparse supervision, a semantic gap in unstructured CRM logs, and inability to capture relative lead priority. While Large Language Models(LLMs) offer superior semantic understanding of customer interactions, general-purpose LLMs are ill-suited for lead ranking: they generate text rather than comparable scores, and lack alignment with the hierarchical priorities of sales funnels. We introduce an LLM-based discriminative framework for sales lead scoring, which supports joint modeling of structured CRM features and unstructured customer interactions. On top of this framework, we propose HPRO (Hierarchical Preference Ranking Optimization), which augments sales lead scoring with a hierarchical preference ranking objective. HPRO employs a margin-aware Bradley-Terry formulation to transform sparse binary labels into dense, funnel-aware preference pairs, enabling lead scoring to leverage both pointwise and pairwise supervision. Experiments on large-scale data from a leading NEV brand demonstrate state-of-the-art classification (AUC 0.8161) and ranking performance (+39.7% precision among top-ranked leads). A 132-day online A/B test validates 9.5% sales volume uplift, confirming real-world commercial impact.

SAILRec: Steering LLM Attention to Dual-Side Semantically Aligned Collaborative Embeddings for Recommendation

Recent LLM-based recommenders enhance language models with collaborative embeddings from user-item interactions, but making such embeddings available does not ensure their proper use during inference. Through a diagnostic attention analysis, we find that the utilization of collaborative embeddings is depth-dependent and alignment-sensitive, suggesting that LLMs need to balance their internal semantic knowledge with external collaborative knowledge. To address this issue, we propose SAILRec, an LLM-based recommender that improves this balance through dual-side semantic alignment and hierarchical attention steering. The former aligns item-side embeddings with item-text semantics and user-side embeddings with codebook-based semantic profiles, while the latter suppresses premature shallow-layer collaborative interference and strengthens collaborative evidence in deeper decision layers. Experiments on MovieLens-1M and Amazon-Book show that SAILRec consistently outperforms representative baselines, with ablation and masking analyses validating its key designs.

Bayesian learning for the stochastic shortest path problem

Sequential decision-making problems are often modelled as a Markov decision process (MDP). We focus on the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem, which is an infinite-horizon undiscounted MDP with absorbing terminal states. We develop a Bayesian framework to learn the optimal decision strategy through interactions with the decision-making task. Specifically, we learn the optimal action-value function $Q^*$, but unlike many existing Bayesian approaches, we do not rely on unrealistic modelling assumptions and ad-hoc approximations. Our approach is to directly construct the posterior beliefs for $Q^*$ through Bellman's optimality equations. For deterministic rewards, we characterise the posterior as a distribution with a manifold density. To facilitate simpler inference, we relax the likelihood so that a Lebesgue density exists. The flip side is to create unidentifiability issues. Specifically, the relaxed posterior can have significant mass on improper decision rules, while the exact posterior will not. We also calculate the exact posterior probabilities for optimal action selections for the tabular parametrisation of $Q^*$, a Gaussian likelihood relaxation and a Gaussian prior, which is useful in benchmarking studies. Numerical studies on variants of the Deep Sea benchmark verify our findings. We demonstrate that our framework faithfully quantifies uncertainty and, compared to other temporal-difference-based Bayesian methodologies, is more data efficient. We conclude with recommendations for future work.

An Empirical Audit of Input Encoders for Multi-Channel Signal Transformers

Transformers consuming multi-channel scalar signals must embed $C$ simultaneous values into one $d_{\text{model}}$-dimensional vector per time step. We empirically audit eight input encoders -- spanning a shared-scalar baseline, per-channel linear projections, an orthogonality regulariser, a nonlinear MLP stem, block-partitioned concatenation, channel-independent and channel-as-token architectures, and a projected positional encoding -- on a synthetic benchmark designed to make channel identity informative and on ETTh1 as a real-data check, measured in next-step negative log-likelihood (NLL). The headline is one of practical near-equivalence within a wide "top tier": the standard per-channel linear projection (nn.Linear(C, $d_{\text{model}}$)) matches every alternative in that tier up to small, statistically real but practically modest, differences. Two encoders lose decisively: the shared-scalar baseline, which collapses for information-theoretic reasons we make explicit, and the channel-independent PatchTST-spirit baseline, which underperforms on both benchmarks and overfits universally on the synthetic one. Paired tests resolve two small gaps: projecting the sinusoidal positional encoding through a learned linear layer edges the rest at small $C$, with a direct geometric probe showing the mechanism is positional-channel orthogonalisation; a nonlinear MLP stem edges them at the largest $C$ we test, with the gap shrinking under more training data. The practical recommendation is to use nn.Linear(C, $d_{\text{model}}$) by default and reach for something more elaborate only when the task at hand gives a real reason to do so. Code and data to reproduce every experiment in this paper are available at https://github.com/OssiLehtinen/channel-encoder-audit