MVP: Winning Solution to SMP Challenge 2025 Video Track

Social media platforms serve as central hubs for content dissemination, opinion expression, and public engagement across diverse modalities. Accurately predicting the popularity of social media videos enables valuable applications in content recommendation, trend detection, and audience engagement. In this paper, we present Multimodal Video Predictor (MVP), our winning solution to the Video Track of the SMP Challenge 2025. MVP constructs expressive post representations by integrating deep video features extracted from pretrained models with user metadata and contextual information. The framework applies systematic preprocessing techniques, including log-transformations and outlier removal, to improve model robustness. A gradient-boosted regression model is trained to capture complex patterns across modalities. Our approach ranked first in the official evaluation of the Video Track, demonstrating its effectiveness and reliability for multimodal video popularity prediction on social platforms. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SMPDVideo.

Real-time and personalized product recommendations for large e-commerce platforms

We present a methodology to provide real-time and personalized product recommendations for large e-commerce platforms, specifically focusing on fashion retail. Our approach aims to achieve accurate and scalable recommendations with minimal response times, ensuring user satisfaction, leveraging Graph Neural Networks and parsimonious learning methodologies. Extensive experimentation with datasets from one of the largest e-commerce platforms demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in forecasting purchase sequences and handling multi-interaction scenarios, achieving efficient personalized recommendations under real-world constraints.

"Who Should I Believe?": User Interpretation and Decision-Making When a Family Healthcare Robot Contradicts Human Memory

Advancements in robotic capabilities for providing physical assistance, psychological support, and daily health management are making the deployment of intelligent healthcare robots in home environments increasingly feasible in the near future. However, challenges arise when the information provided by these robots contradicts users' memory, raising concerns about user trust and decision-making. This paper presents a study that examines how varying a robot's level of transparency and sociability influences user interpretation, decision-making and perceived trust when faced with conflicting information from a robot. In a 2 x 2 between-subjects online study, 176 participants watched videos of a Furhat robot acting as a family healthcare assistant and suggesting a fictional user to take medication at a different time from that remembered by the user. Results indicate that robot transparency influenced users' interpretation of information discrepancies: with a low transparency robot, the most frequent assumption was that the user had not correctly remembered the time, while with the high transparency robot, participants were more likely to attribute the discrepancy to external factors, such as a partner or another household member modifying the robot's information. Additionally, participants exhibited a tendency toward overtrust, often prioritizing the robot's recommendations over the user's memory, even when suspecting system malfunctions or third-party interference. These findings highlight the impact of transparency mechanisms in robotic systems, the complexity and importance associated with system access control for multi-user robots deployed in home environments, and the potential risks of users' over reliance on robots in sensitive domains such as healthcare.

Hybrid Deep Learning and Signal Processing for Arabic Dialect Recognition in Low-Resource Settings

Arabic dialect recognition presents a significant challenge in speech technology due to the linguistic diversity of Arabic and the scarcity of large annotated datasets, particularly for underrepresented dialects. This research investigates hybrid modeling strategies that integrate classical signal processing techniques with deep learning architectures to address this problem in low-resource scenarios. Two hybrid models were developed and evaluated: (1) Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) combined with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and (2) Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) features combined with a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). The models were trained on a dialect-filtered subset of the Common Voice Arabic dataset, with dialect labels assigned based on speaker metadata. Experimental results demonstrate that the MFCC + CNN architecture achieved superior performance, with an accuracy of 91.2% and strong precision, recall, and F1-scores, significantly outperforming the Wavelet + RNN configuration, which achieved an accuracy of 66.5%. These findings highlight the effectiveness of leveraging spectral features with convolutional models for Arabic dialect recognition, especially when working with limited labeled data. The study also identifies limitations related to dataset size, potential regional overlaps in labeling, and model optimization, providing a roadmap for future research. Recommendations for further improvement include the adoption of larger annotated corpora, integration of self-supervised learning techniques, and exploration of advanced neural architectures such as Transformers. Overall, this research establishes a strong baseline for future developments in Arabic dialect recognition within resource-constrained environments.

RecCoT: Enhancing Recommendation via Chain-of-Thought

In real-world applications, users always interact with items in multiple aspects, such as through implicit binary feedback (e.g., clicks, dislikes, long views) and explicit feedback (e.g., comments, reviews). Modern recommendation systems (RecSys) learn user-item collaborative signals from these implicit feedback signals as a large-scale binary data-streaming, subsequently recommending other highly similar items based on users' personalized historical interactions. However, from this collaborative-connection perspective, the RecSys does not focus on the actual content of the items themselves but instead prioritizes higher-probability signals of behavioral co-occurrence among items. Consequently, under this binary learning paradigm, the RecSys struggles to understand why a user likes or dislikes certain items. To alleviate it, some works attempt to utilize the content-based reviews to capture the semantic knowledge to enhance recommender models. However, most of these methods focus on predicting the ratings of reviews, but do not provide a human-understandable explanation.

RAG-VisualRec: An Open Resource for Vision- and Text-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Recommendation

This paper addresses the challenge of developing multimodal recommender systems for the movie domain, where limited metadata (e.g., title, genre) often hinders the generation of robust recommendations. We introduce a resource that combines LLM-generated plot descriptions with trailer-derived visual embeddings in a unified pipeline supporting both Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and collaborative filtering. Central to our approach is a data augmentation step that transforms sparse metadata into richer textual signals, alongside fusion strategies (e.g., PCA, CCA) that integrate visual cues. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that CCA-based fusion significantly boosts recall compared to unimodal baselines, while an LLM-driven re-ranking step further improves NDCG, particularly in scenarios with limited textual data. By releasing this framework, we invite further exploration of multi-modal recommendation techniques tailored to cold-start, novelty-focused, and domain-specific settings. All code, data, and detailed documentation are publicly available at: https://github.com/RecSys-lab/RAG-VisualRec

Dynamic Context-Aware Prompt Recommendation for Domain-Specific AI Applications

LLM-powered applications are highly susceptible to the quality of user prompts, and crafting high-quality prompts can often be challenging especially for domain-specific applications. This paper presents a novel dynamic context-aware prompt recommendation system for domain-specific AI applications. Our solution combines contextual query analysis, retrieval-augmented knowledge grounding, hierarchical skill organization, and adaptive skill ranking to generate relevant and actionable prompt suggestions. The system leverages behavioral telemetry and a two-stage hierarchical reasoning process to dynamically select and rank relevant skills, and synthesizes prompts using both predefined and adaptive templates enhanced with few-shot learning. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves high usefulness and relevance, as validated by both automated and expert evaluations.

Exploring Graph-Transformer Out-of-Distribution Generalization Abilities

Deep learning on graphs has shown remarkable success across numerous applications, including social networks, bio-physics, traffic networks, and recommendation systems. Regardless of their successes, current methods frequently depend on the assumption that training and testing data share the same distribution, a condition rarely met in real-world scenarios. While graph-transformer (GT) backbones have recently outperformed traditional message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) in multiple in-distribution (ID) benchmarks, their effectiveness under distribution shifts remains largely unexplored. In this work, we address the challenge of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization for graph neural networks, with a special focus on the impact of backbone architecture. We systematically evaluate GT and hybrid backbones in OOD settings and compare them to MPNNs. To do so, we adapt several leading domain generalization (DG) algorithms to work with GTs and assess their performance on a benchmark designed to test a variety of distribution shifts. Our results reveal that GT and hybrid GT-MPNN backbones consistently demonstrate stronger generalization ability compared to MPNNs, even without specialized DG algorithms. Additionally, we propose a novel post-training analysis approach that compares the clustering structure of the entire ID and OOD test datasets, specifically examining domain alignment and class separation. Demonstrating its model-agnostic design, this approach not only provided meaningful insights into GT and MPNN backbones. It also shows promise for broader applicability to DG problems beyond graph learning, offering a deeper perspective on generalization abilities that goes beyond standard accuracy metrics. Together, our findings highlight the promise of graph-transformers for robust, real-world graph learning and set a new direction for future research in OOD generalization.

DeepQuark: deep-neural-network approach to multiquark bound states

For the first time, we implement the deep-neural-network-based variational Monte Carlo approach for the multiquark bound states, whose complexity surpasses that of electron or nucleon systems due to strong SU(3) color interactions. We design a novel and high-efficiency architecture, DeepQuark, to address the unique challenges in multiquark systems such as stronger correlations, extra discrete quantum numbers, and intractable confinement interaction. Our method demonstrates competitive performance with state-of-the-art approaches, including diffusion Monte Carlo and Gaussian expansion method, in the nucleon, doubly heavy tetraquark, and fully heavy tetraquark systems. Notably, it outperforms existing calculations for pentaquarks, exemplified by the triply heavy pentaquark. For the nucleon, we successfully incorporate three-body flux-tube confinement interactions without additional computational costs. In tetraquark systems, we consistently describe hadronic molecule $T_{cc}$ and compact tetraquark $T_{bb}$ with an unbiased form of wave function ansatz. In the pentaquark sector, we obtain weakly bound $\bar D^*\Xi_{cc}^*$ molecule $P_{cc\bar c}(5715)$ with $S=\frac{5}{2}$ and its bottom partner $P_{bb\bar b}(15569)$. They can be viewed as the analogs of the molecular $T_{cc}$. We recommend experimental search of $P_{cc\bar c}(5715)$ in the D-wave $J/\psi \Lambda_c$ channel. DeepQuark holds great promise for extension to larger multiquark systems, overcoming the computational barriers in conventional methods. It also serves as a powerful framework for exploring confining mechanism beyond two-body interactions in multiquark states, which may offer valuable insights into nonperturbative QCD and general many-body physics.

Engineering RAG Systems for Real-World Applications: Design, Development, and Evaluation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are emerging as a key approach for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) in external knowledge, addressing limitations in factual accuracy and contextual relevance. However, there is a lack of empirical studies that report on the development of RAG-based implementations grounded in real-world use cases, evaluated through general user involvement, and accompanied by systematic documentation of lessons learned. This paper presents five domain-specific RAG applications developed for real-world scenarios across governance, cybersecurity, agriculture, industrial research, and medical diagnostics. Each system incorporates multilingual OCR, semantic retrieval via vector embeddings, and domain-adapted LLMs, deployed through local servers or cloud APIs to meet distinct user needs. A web-based evaluation involving a total of 100 participants assessed the systems across six dimensions: (i) Ease of Use, (ii) Relevance, (iii) Transparency, (iv) Responsiveness, (v) Accuracy, and (vi) Likelihood of Recommendation. Based on user feedback and our development experience, we documented twelve key lessons learned, highlighting technical, operational, and ethical challenges affecting the reliability and usability of RAG systems in practice.