What is Recommendation? Recommendation is the task of providing personalized suggestions to users based on their preferences and behavior.
Papers and Code
Jun 16, 2025
Abstract:In Sequential Recommendation Systems (SRSs), Transformer models show remarkable performance but face computation cost challenges when modeling long-term user behavior sequences due to the quadratic complexity of the dot-product attention mechanism. By approximating the dot-product attention, linear attention provides an efficient option with linear complexity. However, existing linear attention methods face two limitations: 1) they often use learnable position encodings, which incur extra computational costs in long-term sequence scenarios, and 2) they may not consider the user's fine-grained local preferences and confuse these with the actual change of long-term interests. To remedy these drawbacks, we propose a long-term sequential Recommendation model with Gated Rotary Enhanced Linear Attention (RecGRELA). Specifically, we first propose a Rotary-Enhanced Linear Attention (RELA) module to model long-range dependency within the user's historical information using rotary position encodings. We then introduce a local short operation to incorporate local preferences and demonstrate the theoretical insight. We further introduce a SiLU-based Gated mechanism for RELA (GRELA) to help the model determine whether a user's behavior indicates local interest or a genuine shift in long-term preferences. Experimental results on four public datasets demonstrate that our RecGRELA achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing SRSs while maintaining low memory overhead.
* 24 pages,9 figures
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Jun 16, 2025
Abstract:Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) integrate textual data with graph structures, providing valuable insights in applications such as social network analysis and recommendation systems. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) effectively capture both topological structure and textual information in TAGs but are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Existing graph injection attack (GIA) methods assume that attackers can directly manipulate the embedding layer, producing non-explainable node embeddings. Furthermore, the effectiveness of these attacks often relies on surrogate models with high training costs. Thus, this paper introduces ATAG-LLM, a novel black-box GIA framework tailored for TAGs. Our approach leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate interpretable text-level node attributes directly, ensuring attacks remain feasible in real-world scenarios. We design strategies for LLM prompting that balance exploration and reliability to guide text generation, and propose a similarity assessment method to evaluate attack text effectiveness in disrupting graph homophily. This method efficiently perturbs the target node with minimal training costs in a strict black-box setting, ensuring a text-level graph injection attack for TAGs. Experiments on real-world TAG datasets validate the superior performance of ATAG-LLM compared to state-of-the-art embedding-level and text-level attack methods.
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Jun 16, 2025
Abstract:Sequential recommender systems aim to model users' evolving preferences by capturing patterns in their historical interactions. Recent advances in this area have leveraged deep neural networks and attention mechanisms to effectively represent sequential behaviors and time-sensitive interests. In this work, we propose C-TLSAN (Content-Enhanced Time-Aware Long- and Short-Term Attention Network), an extension of the TLSAN architecture that jointly models long- and short-term user preferences while incorporating semantic content associated with items, such as product descriptions. C-TLSAN enriches the recommendation pipeline by embedding textual content linked to users' historical interactions directly into both long-term and short-term attention layers. This allows the model to learn from both behavioral patterns and rich item content, enhancing user and item representations across temporal dimensions. By fusing sequential signals with textual semantics, our approach improves the expressiveness and personalization capacity of recommendation systems. We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale Amazon datasets, benchmarking C-TLSAN against state-of-the-art baselines, including recent sequential recommenders based on Large Language Models (LLMs), which represent interaction history and predictions in text form. Empirical results demonstrate that C-TLSAN consistently outperforms strong baselines in next-item prediction tasks. Notably, it improves AUC by 1.66%, Recall@10 by 93.99%, and Precision@10 by 94.80% on average over the best-performing baseline (TLSAN) across 10 Amazon product categories. These results highlight the value of integrating content-aware enhancements into temporal modeling frameworks for sequential recommendation. Our code is available at https://github.com/booml247/cTLSAN.
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Jun 16, 2025
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for recommendation by framing item prediction as a token-by-token language generation task. However, existing methods treat all item tokens equally, simply pursuing likelihood maximization during both optimization and decoding. This overlooks crucial token-level differences in decisiveness-many tokens contribute little to item discrimination yet can dominate optimization or decoding. To quantify token decisiveness, we propose a novel perspective that models item generation as a decision process, measuring token decisiveness by the Information Gain (IG) each token provides in reducing uncertainty about the generated item. Our empirical analysis reveals that most tokens have low IG but often correspond to high logits, disproportionately influencing training loss and decoding, which may impair model performance. Building on these insights, we introduce an Information Gain-based Decisiveness-aware Token handling (IGD) strategy that integrates token decisiveness into both tuning and decoding. Specifically, IGD downweights low-IG tokens during tuning and rebalances decoding to emphasize tokens with high IG. In this way, IGD moves beyond pure likelihood maximization, effectively prioritizing high-decisiveness tokens. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets with two LLM backbones demonstrate that IGD consistently improves recommendation accuracy, achieving significant gains on widely used ranking metrics compared to strong baselines.
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Jun 16, 2025
Abstract:Recommender systems have been widely used in various large-scale user-oriented platforms for many years. However, compared to the rapid developments in the AI community, recommendation systems have not achieved a breakthrough in recent years. For instance, they still rely on a multi-stage cascaded architecture rather than an end-to-end approach, leading to computational fragmentation and optimization inconsistencies, and hindering the effective application of key breakthrough technologies from the AI community in recommendation scenarios. To address these issues, we propose OneRec, which reshapes the recommendation system through an end-to-end generative approach and achieves promising results. Firstly, we have enhanced the computational FLOPs of the current recommendation model by 10 $\times$ and have identified the scaling laws for recommendations within certain boundaries. Secondly, reinforcement learning techniques, previously difficult to apply for optimizing recommendations, show significant potential in this framework. Lastly, through infrastructure optimizations, we have achieved 23.7% and 28.8% Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) on flagship GPUs during training and inference, respectively, aligning closely with the LLM community. This architecture significantly reduces communication and storage overhead, resulting in operating expense that is only 10.6% of traditional recommendation pipelines. Deployed in Kuaishou/Kuaishou Lite APP, it handles 25% of total queries per second, enhancing overall App Stay Time by 0.54% and 1.24%, respectively. Additionally, we have observed significant increases in metrics such as 7-day Lifetime, which is a crucial indicator of recommendation experience. We also provide practical lessons and insights derived from developing, optimizing, and maintaining a production-scale recommendation system with significant real-world impact.
* Authors are listed alphabetically by their first name
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Jun 16, 2025
Abstract:Distributed computing systems are essential for meeting the demands of modern applications, yet transitioning from single-system to distributed environments presents significant challenges. Misallocating resources in shared systems can lead to resource contention, system instability, degraded performance, priority inversion, inefficient utilization, increased latency, and environmental impact. We present BanditWare, an online recommendation system that dynamically selects the most suitable hardware for applications using a contextual multi-armed bandit algorithm. BanditWare balances exploration and exploitation, gradually refining its hardware recommendations based on observed application performance while continuing to explore potentially better options. Unlike traditional statistical and machine learning approaches that rely heavily on large historical datasets, BanditWare operates online, learning and adapting in real-time as new workloads arrive. We evaluated BanditWare on three workflow applications: Cycles (an agricultural science scientific workflow) BurnPro3D (a web-based platform for fire science) and a matrix multiplication application. Designed for seamless integration with the National Data Platform (NDP), BanditWare enables users of all experience levels to optimize resource allocation efficiently.
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Jun 16, 2025
Abstract:Fact verification is essential for ensuring the reliability of LLM applications. In this study, we evaluate 12 pre-trained LLMs and one specialized fact-verifier, including frontier LLMs and open-weight reasoning LLMs, using a collection of examples from 14 fact-checking benchmarks. We share three findings intended to guide future development of more robust fact verifiers. First, we highlight the importance of addressing annotation errors and ambiguity in datasets, demonstrating that approximately 16\% of ambiguous or incorrectly labeled data substantially influences model rankings. Neglecting this issue may result in misleading conclusions during comparative evaluations, and we suggest using a systematic pipeline utilizing LLM-as-a-judge to help identify these issues at scale. Second, we discover that frontier LLMs with few-shot in-context examples, often overlooked in previous works, achieve top-tier performance. We therefore recommend future studies include comparisons with these simple yet highly effective baselines. Lastly, despite their effectiveness, frontier LLMs incur substantial costs, motivating the development of small, fine-tuned fact verifiers. We show that these small models still have room for improvement, particularly on instances that require complex reasoning. Encouragingly, we demonstrate that augmenting training with synthetic multi-hop reasoning data significantly enhances their capabilities in such instances. We release our code, model, and dataset at https://github.com/just1nseo/verifying-the-verifiers
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Jun 16, 2025
Abstract:Composite indicators are widely used to score or classify units evaluated on multiple criteria. Their construction involves aggregating criteria evaluations, a common practice in Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding (MCDA). In MCDA, various methods have been proposed to address key aspects of multiple criteria evaluations, such as the measurement scales of the criteria, the degree of acceptable compensation between them, and their potential interactions. However, beyond producing a final score or classification, it is essential to ensure the explainability and interpretability of results as well as the procedure's transparency. This paper proposes a method for constructing explainable and interpretable composite indicators using "if..., then..." decision rules. We consider the explainability and interpretability of composite indicators in four scenarios: (i) decision rules explain numerical scores obtained from an aggregation of numerical codes corresponding to ordinal qualifiers; (ii) an obscure numerical composite indicator classifies units into quantiles; (iii) given preference information provided by a Decision Maker in the form of classifications of some reference units, a composite indicator is constructed using decision rules; (iv) the classification of a set of units results from the application of an MCDA method and is explained by decision rules. To induce the rules from scored or classified units, we apply the Dominance-based Rough Set Approach. The resulting decision rules relate the class assignment or unit's score to threshold conditions on values of selected indicators in an intelligible way, clarifying the underlying rationale. Moreover, they serve to recommend composite indicator assessment for new units of interest.
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Jun 15, 2025
Abstract:With the rapid development of recommendation models and device computing power, device-based recommendation has become an important research area due to its better real-time performance and privacy protection. Previously, Transformer-based sequential recommendation models have been widely applied in this field because they outperform Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based recommendation models in terms of performance. However, as the length of interaction sequences increases, Transformer-based models introduce significantly more space and computational overhead compared to RNN-based models, posing challenges for device-based recommendation. To balance real-time performance and high performance on devices, we propose Device-Cloud \underline{Co}llaborative \underline{Corr}ection Framework for On-Device \underline{Rec}ommendation (CoCorrRec). CoCorrRec uses a self-correction network (SCN) to correct parameters with extremely low time cost. By updating model parameters during testing based on the input token, it achieves performance comparable to current optimal but more complex Transformer-based models. Furthermore, to prevent SCN from overfitting, we design a global correction network (GCN) that processes hidden states uploaded from devices and provides a global correction solution. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that CoCorrRec outperforms existing Transformer-based and RNN-based device recommendation models in terms of performance, with fewer parameters and lower FLOPs, thereby achieving a balance between real-time performance and high efficiency.
* To be published in IJCAI-2025
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Jun 15, 2025
Abstract:Notification recommendation systems are critical to driving user engagement on professional platforms like LinkedIn. Designing such systems involves integrating heterogeneous signals across domains, capturing temporal dynamics, and optimizing for multiple, often competing, objectives. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) provide a powerful framework for modeling complex interactions in such environments. In this paper, we present a cross-domain GNN-based system deployed at LinkedIn that unifies user, content, and activity signals into a single, large-scale graph. By training on this cross-domain structure, our model significantly outperforms single-domain baselines on key tasks, including click-through rate (CTR) prediction and professional engagement. We introduce architectural innovations including temporal modeling and multi-task learning, which further enhance performance. Deployed in LinkedIn's notification system, our approach led to a 0.10% lift in weekly active users and a 0.62% improvement in CTR. We detail our graph construction process, model design, training pipeline, and both offline and online evaluations. Our work demonstrates the scalability and effectiveness of cross-domain GNNs in real-world, high-impact applications.
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