Think before Recommendation: Autonomous Reasoning-enhanced Recommender

The core task of recommender systems is to learn user preferences from historical user-item interactions. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), recent research has explored leveraging the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to enhance rating prediction tasks. However, existing distillation-based methods suffer from limitations such as the teacher model's insufficient recommendation capability, costly and static supervision, and superficial transfer of reasoning ability. To address these issues, this paper proposes RecZero, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based recommendation paradigm that abandons the traditional multi-model and multi-stage distillation approach. Instead, RecZero trains a single LLM through pure RL to autonomously develop reasoning capabilities for rating prediction. RecZero consists of two key components: (1) "Think-before-Recommendation" prompt construction, which employs a structured reasoning template to guide the model in step-wise analysis of user interests, item features, and user-item compatibility; and (2) rule-based reward modeling, which adopts group relative policy optimization (GRPO) to compute rewards for reasoning trajectories and optimize the LLM. Additionally, the paper explores a hybrid paradigm, RecOne, which combines supervised fine-tuning with RL, initializing the model with cold-start reasoning samples and further optimizing it with RL. Experimental results demonstrate that RecZero and RecOne significantly outperform existing baseline methods on multiple benchmark datasets, validating the superiority of the RL paradigm in achieving autonomous reasoning-enhanced recommender systems.

QoSGMAA: A Robust Multi-Order Graph Attention and Adversarial Framework for Sparse QoS Prediction

With the rapid advancement of internet technologies, network services have become critical for delivering diverse and reliable applications to users. However, the exponential growth in the number of available services has resulted in many similar offerings, posing significant challenges in selecting optimal services. Predicting Quality of Service (QoS) accurately thus becomes a fundamental prerequisite for ensuring reliability and user satisfaction. However, existing QoS prediction methods often fail to capture rich contextual information and exhibit poor performance under extreme data sparsity and structural noise. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel architecture, QoSMGAA, specifically designed to enhance prediction accuracy in complex and noisy network service environments. QoSMGAA integrates a multi-order attention mechanism to aggregate extensive contextual data and predict missing QoS values effectively. Additionally, our method incorporates adversarial neural networks to perform autoregressive supervised learning based on transformed interaction matrices. To capture complex, higher-order interactions among users and services, we employ a discrete sampling technique leveraging the Gumbel-Softmax method to generate informative negative samples. Comprehensive experimental validation conducted on large-scale real-world datasets demonstrates that our proposed model significantly outperforms existing baseline methods, highlighting its strong potential for practical deployment in service selection and recommendation scenarios.

GTR-Mamba: Geometry-to-Tangent Routing for Hyperbolic POI Recommendation

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is a critical task in modern Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs), aiming to model the complex decision-making process of human mobility to provide personalized recommendations for a user's next check-in location. Existing POI recommendation models, predominantly based on Graph Neural Networks and sequential models, have been extensively studied. However, these models face a fundamental limitation: they struggle to simultaneously capture the inherent hierarchical structure of spatial choices and the dynamics and irregular shifts of user-specific temporal contexts. To overcome this limitation, we propose GTR-Mamba, a novel framework for cross-manifold conditioning and routing. GTR-Mamba leverages the distinct advantages of different mathematical spaces for different tasks: it models the static, tree-like preference hierarchies in hyperbolic geometry, while routing the dynamic sequence updates to a novel Mamba layer in the computationally stable and efficient Euclidean tangent space. This process is coordinated by a cross-manifold channel that fuses spatio-temporal information to explicitly steer the State Space Model (SSM), enabling flexible adaptation to contextual changes. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GTR-Mamba consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models in next POI recommendation.

MGFRec: Towards Reinforced Reasoning Recommendation with Multiple Groundings and Feedback

The powerful reasoning and generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have inspired researchers to apply them to reasoning-based recommendation tasks, which require in-depth reasoning about user interests and the generation of recommended items. However, previous reasoning-based recommendation methods have typically performed inference within the language space alone, without incorporating the actual item space. This has led to over-interpreting user interests and deviating from real items. Towards this research gap, we propose performing multiple rounds of grounding during inference to help the LLM better understand the actual item space, which could ensure that its reasoning remains aligned with real items. Furthermore, we introduce a user agent that provides feedback during each grounding step, enabling the LLM to better recognize and adapt to user interests. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three Amazon review datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating multiple groundings and feedback. These findings underscore the critical importance of reasoning within the actual item space, rather than being confined to the language space, for recommendation tasks.

Civic Ground Truth in News Recommenders: A Method for Public Value Scoring

Research in news recommendation systems (NRS) continues to explore the best ways to integrate normative goals such as editorial objectives and public service values into existing systems. Prior efforts have incorporated expert input or audience feedback to quantify these values, laying the groundwork for more civic-minded recommender systems. This paper contributes to that trajectory, introducing a method for embedding civic values into NRS through large-scale, structured audience evaluations. The proposed civic ground truth approach aims to generate value-based labels through a nationally representative survey that are generalisable across a wider news corpus, using automated metadata enrichment.

Inductive Transfer Learning for Graph-Based Recommenders

Graph-based recommender systems are commonly trained in transductive settings, which limits their applicability to new users, items, or datasets. We propose NBF-Rec, a graph-based recommendation model that supports inductive transfer learning across datasets with disjoint user and item sets. Unlike conventional embedding-based methods that require retraining for each domain, NBF-Rec computes node embeddings dynamically at inference time. We evaluate the method on seven real-world datasets spanning movies, music, e-commerce, and location check-ins. NBF-Rec achieves competitive performance in zero-shot settings, where no target domain data is used for training, and demonstrates further improvements through lightweight fine-tuning. These results show that inductive transfer is feasible in graph-based recommendation and that interaction-level message passing supports generalization across datasets without requiring aligned users or items.

CLIN-LLM: A Safety-Constrained Hybrid Framework for Clinical Diagnosis and Treatment Generation

Accurate symptom-to-disease classification and clinically grounded treatment recommendations remain challenging, particularly in heterogeneous patient settings with high diagnostic risk. Existing large language model (LLM)-based systems often lack medical grounding and fail to quantify uncertainty, resulting in unsafe outputs. We propose CLIN-LLM, a safety-constrained hybrid pipeline that integrates multimodal patient encoding, uncertainty-calibrated disease classification, and retrieval-augmented treatment generation. The framework fine-tunes BioBERT on 1,200 clinical cases from the Symptom2Disease dataset and incorporates Focal Loss with Monte Carlo Dropout to enable confidence-aware predictions from free-text symptoms and structured vitals. Low-certainty cases (18%) are automatically flagged for expert review, ensuring human oversight. For treatment generation, CLIN-LLM employs Biomedical Sentence-BERT to retrieve top-k relevant dialogues from the 260,000-sample MedDialog corpus. The retrieved evidence and patient context are fed into a fine-tuned FLAN-T5 model for personalized treatment generation, followed by post-processing with RxNorm for antibiotic stewardship and drug-drug interaction (DDI) screening. CLIN-LLM achieves 98% accuracy and F1 score, outperforming ClinicalBERT by 7.1% (p < 0.001), with 78% top-5 retrieval precision and a clinician-rated validity of 4.2 out of 5. Unsafe antibiotic suggestions are reduced by 67% compared to GPT-5. These results demonstrate CLIN-LLM's robustness, interpretability, and clinical safety alignment. The proposed system provides a deployable, human-in-the-loop decision support framework for resource-limited healthcare environments. Future work includes integrating imaging and lab data, multilingual extensions, and clinical trial validation.

A Closed-Loop Personalized Learning Agent Integrating Neural Cognitive Diagnosis, Bounded-Ability Adaptive Testing, and LLM-Driven Feedback

As information technology advances, education is moving from one-size-fits-all instruction toward personalized learning. However, most methods handle modeling, item selection, and feedback in isolation rather than as a closed loop. This leads to coarse or opaque student models, assumption-bound adaptivity that ignores diagnostic posteriors, and generic, non-actionable feedback. To address these limitations, this paper presents an end-to-end personalized learning agent, EduLoop-Agent, which integrates a Neural Cognitive Diagnosis model (NCD), a Bounded-Ability Estimation Computerized Adaptive Testing strategy (BECAT), and large language models (LLMs). The NCD module provides fine-grained estimates of students' mastery at the knowledge-point level; BECAT dynamically selects subsequent items to maximize relevance and learning efficiency; and LLMs convert diagnostic signals into structured, actionable feedback. Together, these components form a closed-loop framework of ``Diagnosis--Recommendation--Feedback.'' Experiments on the ASSISTments dataset show that the NCD module achieves strong performance on response prediction while yielding interpretable mastery assessments. The adaptive recommendation strategy improves item relevance and personalization, and the LLM-based feedback offers targeted study guidance aligned with identified weaknesses. Overall, the results indicate that the proposed design is effective and practically deployable, providing a feasible pathway to generating individualized learning trajectories in intelligent education.

AesCrop: Aesthetic-driven Cropping Guided by Composition

Aesthetic-driven image cropping is crucial for applications like view recommendation and thumbnail generation, where visual appeal significantly impacts user engagement. A key factor in visual appeal is composition--the deliberate arrangement of elements within an image. Some methods have successfully incorporated compositional knowledge through evaluation-based and regression-based paradigms. However, evaluation-based methods lack globality while regression-based methods lack diversity. Recently, hybrid approaches that integrate both paradigms have emerged, bridging the gap between these two to achieve better diversity and globality. Notably, existing hybrid methods do not incorporate photographic composition guidance, a key attribute that defines photographic aesthetics. In this work, we introduce AesCrop, a composition-aware hybrid image-cropping model that integrates a VMamba image encoder, augmented with a novel Mamba Composition Attention Bias (MCAB) and a transformer decoder to perform end-to-end rank-based image cropping, generating multiple crops along with the corresponding quality scores. By explicitly encoding compositional cues into the attention mechanism, MCAB directs AesCrop to focus on the most compositionally salient regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AesCrop outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, delivering superior quantitative metrics and qualitatively more pleasing crops.

Towards Explainable Personalized Recommendations by Learning from Users' Photos

Explaining the output of a complex system, such as a Recommender System (RS), is becoming of utmost importance for both users and companies. In this paper we explore the idea that personalized explanations can be learned as recommendation themselves. There are plenty of online services where users can upload some photos, in addition to rating items. We assume that users take these photos to reinforce or justify their opinions about the items. For this reason we try to predict what photo a user would take of an item, because that image is the argument that can best convince her of the qualities of the item. In this sense, an RS can explain its results and, therefore, increase its reliability. Furthermore, once we have a model to predict attractive images for users, we can estimate their distribution. Thus, the companies acquire a vivid knowledge about the aspects that the clients highlight of their products. The paper includes a formal framework that estimates the authorship probability for a given pair (user, photo). To illustrate the proposal, we use data gathered from TripAdvisor containing the reviews (with photos) of restaurants in six cities of different sizes.