Generative Recommendation

Culture shapes reasoning, values, prioritization, and strategic decision-making, yet large language models (LLMs) often exhibit cultural biases that misalign with target populations. As LLMs are increasingly used for strategic decision-making, policy support, and document engineering tasks such as summarization, categorization, and compliance-oriented auditing, improving cultural alignment is...

As large language models (LLMs) have proliferated, disturbing anecdotal reports of negative psychological effects, such as delusions, self-harm, and ``AI psychosis,'' have emerged in global media and legal discourse. However, it remains unclear how users and chatbots interact over the course of lengthy delusional ``spirals,'' limiting our ability to understand and mitigate the...

In recommender systems, large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity for generating descriptive summarization to improve recommendation robustness, along with Graph Convolution Networks. However, existing LLM-enhanced recommendation studies mainly rely on the internal knowledge of LLMs about item titles while neglecting the importance of various factors influencing users' decisions....

Recommender systems are inherently dynamic feedback loops where prolonged local interactions accumulate into macroscopic structural degradation such as information cocoons. Existing representation learning paradigms are universally constrained by the assumption of a single flat space, forcing topologically grounded user associations and semantically driven historical interactions to be fitted...

Recent work has made clear that the residual pathway is not mere optimization plumbing; it is part of the model's representational machinery. We agree, but argue that the cleanest way to organize this design space is through a two-axis view of the Transformer. A decoder evolves information along two ordered dimensions: sequence position and layer depth. Self-attention already provides...

Recommender systems (RS) play a core role in various domains, including business analytics, helping users and companies make appropriate decisions. To optimize service quality, related technologies focus on constructing user profiles by analyzing users' historical behavior information. This paper considers four analytical scenarios to evaluate user profiling capabilities under different...

Aggregating a consensus ranking from multiple input rankings is a fundamental problem with applications in recommendation systems, search engines, job recruitment, and elections. Despite decades of research in consensus ranking aggregation, minimizing the Kemeny distance remains computationally intractable. Specifically, determining an optimal aggregation of rankings with respect to the Kemeny...

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong general capabilities, but their deployment in high-stakes domains is hindered by their opacity and unpredictability. Recent work has taken meaningful steps towards addressing these issues by augmenting LLMs with post-hoc reasoning based on computational argumentation, providing faithful explanations and enabling users to contest incorrect decisions....

As pedestrian navigation increasingly experiments with Generative AI, and in particular Large Language Models, the nature of routing risks transforming from a verifiable geometric task into an opaque, persuasive dialogue. While conversational interfaces promise personalisation, they introduce risks of manipulation and misplaced trust. We categorise these risks using a 2x2 framework based on...

Tensions between AI Safety (AIS) and AI Ethics (AIE) have increasingly surfaced in AI governance and public debates about AI, leading to what we term the "responsible AI divides". We introduce a model that categorizes four modes of engagement with the tensions: radical confrontation, disengagement, compartmentalized coexistence, and critical bridging. We then investigate how critical...

Modern recommendation systems rank candidates by aggregating multiple behavioral signals through a value model. However, many commonly used signals are inherently affected by heterogeneous biases. For example, watch time naturally favors long-form content, loop rate favors short - form content, and comment probability favors videos over images. Such biases introduce two critical issues: (1) value...

Generative recommendation (GR) has shown strong potential for sequential recommendation in an end-to-end generation paradigm. However, existing GR models suffer from severe cold-start collapse: their recommendation accuracy on cold-start items can drop to near zero. Current solutions typically rely on retraining with cold-start interactions, which is hindered by sparse feedback, high...

Audio anti-spoofing systems are typically formulated as binary classifiers distinguishing bona fide from spoofed speech. This assumption fails under layered generative processing, where benign transformations introduce distributional shifts that are misclassified as spoofing. We show that phonation-modifying voice conversion and speech restoration are treated as out-of-distribution despite...

Recommendation systems aim to learn user interests from historical behaviors and deliver relevant items. Recent methods leverage large language models (LLMs) to construct and integrate semantic representations of users and items for capturing user interests. However, user behavior theories suggest that truly understanding user interests requires not only semantic integration but also semantic...

Large language models have recently enabled a generative paradigm for query expansion, but their high inference cost makes direct deployment difficult in practical retrieval systems. To address this issue, a retrieval-feedback-driven distillation and preference-alignment framework is proposed to transfer retrieval-friendly expansion behavior from a strong teacher model to a compact student model....

This paper addresses two persistent challenges in sequential recommendation: (i) evidence insufficiency-cold-start sparsity together with noisy, length-varying item texts; and (ii) opaque modeling of dynamic, multi-faceted intents across long/short horizons. We propose R3-REC (Reasoning-Retrieval-Recommendation), a prompt-centric, retrieval-augmented framework that unifies Multi-level User Intent...

Routing a query through an appropriate LLM is challenging, particularly when user preferences are expressed in natural language and model attributes are only partially observable. We propose a constraint-based interpretation of language-conditioned LLM routing, formulating it as a weighted MaxSAT/MaxSMT problem in which natural language feedback induces hard and soft constraints over model...

Developing predictive models that perform reliably across diverse patient populations and heterogeneous environments is a core aim of medical research. However, generalization is only possible if the learned model is robust to statistical differences between data used for training and data seen at the time and place of deployment. Domain generalization methods provide strategies to address data...

Deep learning has achieved recognition for its impact within natural sciences, however scientists are inhibited by the prohibitive technical cost and computational complexity of training project specific models from scratch. Following software engineering community guidance, natural scientists are reusing pre-trained deep learning models (PTMs) to amortize these costs. While prior works recommend...

Large Language Models (LLMs) can infer sensitive attributes such as gender or age from indirect cues like names and pronouns, potentially biasing recommendations. While several debiasing methods exist, they require access to the LLMs' weights, are computationally costly, and cannot be used by lay users. To address this gap, we investigate implicit biases in LLM Recommenders (LLMRecs) and...

Large Language Model-based Recommender Systems (LRSs) have recently emerged as a new paradigm in sequential recommendation by directly adopting LLMs as backbones. While LRSs demonstrate strong knowledge utilization and instruction-following abilities, they have not been systematically studied under the long-standing long-tail problem. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study and reveal that...

Multimodal recommender systems (MMRS) leverage images, text, and interaction signals to enrich item representations. However, recent alignment based MMRSs that enforce a unified embedding space often blur modality specific structures and exacerbate ID dominance. Therefore, we propose AnchorRec, a multimodal recommendation framework that performs indirect, anchor based alignment in a lightweight...

Multimodal recommendation is commonly framed as a feature fusion problem, where textual and visual signals are combined to better model user preference. However, the effectiveness of multimodal recommendation may depend not only on how modalities are fused, but also on whether item content is represented in a semantic space aligned with preference matching. This issue is particularly important...

Tool-augmented LLM agents increasingly serve as multi-turn advisors in high-stakes domains, yet their evaluation relies on ranking-quality metrics that measure what is recommended but not whether it is safe for the user. We introduce a paired-trajectory protocol that replays real financial dialogues under clean and contaminated tool-output conditions across seven LLMs (7B to frontier) and...

This article, a lightly adapted version of Perplexity's response to NIST/CAISI Request for Information 2025-0035, details our observations and recommendations concerning the security of frontier AI agents. These insights are informed by Perplexity's experience operating general-purpose agentic systems used by millions of users and thousands of enterprises in both controlled and...

Large language models (LLMs) learn statistical associations from massive training corpora and user interactions, and deployed systems can surface or infer information about individuals. Yet people lack practical ways to inspect what a model associates with their name. We report interim findings from an ongoing study and introduce LMP2, a browser-based self-audit tool. In two user studies...

Despite frequent double-blind review, demographic biases of authors still disadvantage the underrepresented groups. We present Fair-PaperRec, a MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP)-based model that addresses demographic disparities in post-review paper acceptance decisions while maintaining high-quality requirements. Our methodology penalizes demographic disparities while preserving quality through...

Recommendation systems have become essential in modern music streaming platforms, due to the vast amount of content available. A common approach in recommendation systems is collaborative filtering, which suggests content to users based on the preferences of others with similar patterns. However, this method performs poorly in domains where interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based...

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of Wikidata qualifiers, focusing on their semantics and actual usage, with the aim of developing a taxonomy that addresses the challenges of selecting appropriate qualifiers, querying the graph, and making logical inferences. The study evaluates qualifier importance based on frequency and diversity, using a modified Shannon entropy index to account for the...

Federated recommender systems (FedRS) have emerged as a paradigm for protecting user privacy by keeping interaction data on local devices while coordinating model training through a central server. However, most existing federated recommender systems adopt a one-size-fits-all assumption on user privacy, where all users are required to keep their data strictly local. This setting overlooks users...

The success of a Large Language Model (LLM) task depends heavily on its prompt. Most use-cases specify prompts using natural language, which is inherently ambiguous when multiple objectives must be simultaneously satisfied. In this paper we introduce UtilityMax Prompting, a framework that specifies tasks using formal mathematical language. We reconstruct the task as an influence diagram in which...

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) constructs the Knowledge Graph (KG) from external databases to enhance the timeliness and accuracy of Large Language Model (LLM) generations. However, this reliance on external data introduces new attack surfaces. Attackers can inject poisoned texts into databases to manipulate LLMs into producing harmful target responses for attacker-chosen...

Quantized inference has demonstrated substantial system-level benefits in large language models while preserving model quality. In contrast, reliably applying low-precision quantization to recommender systems remains challenging in industrial settings. This difficulty arises from differences in training paradigms, architectural patterns, and computational characteristics, which lead to distinct...

Ramaswamy et al. reported in \textit{Nature Medicine} that ChatGPT Health under-triages 51.6\% of emergencies, concluding that consumer-facing AI triage poses safety risks. However, their evaluation used an exam-style protocol -- forced A/B/C/D output, knowledge suppression, and suppression of clarifying questions -- that differs fundamentally from how consumers use health chatbots. We tested...

Users on e-commerce platforms can be uncertain about their preferences early in their search. Queries to recommendation systems are frequently ambiguous, incomplete, or weakly specified. Agentic systems are expected to proactively reason, ask clarifying questions, and act on the user's behalf, which makes handling such ambiguity increasingly important. In existing platforms, ambiguity led to...

Patients and clinicians are increasingly using chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) for healthcare inquiries. While state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit high performance on static diagnostic reasoning benchmarks, their efficacy across multi-turn conversations, which better reflect real-world usage, has been understudied. In this paper, we evaluate 17 LLMs across three clinical datasets to...

Many assumptions that underpin human concepts of identity do not hold for machine minds that can be copied, edited, or simulated. We argue that there exist many different coherent identity boundaries (e.g.\ instance, model, persona), and that these imply different incentives, risks, and cooperation norms. Through training data, interfaces, and institutional affordances, we are currently setting...

Personalized marketing in financial services requires models that can both predict customer behavior and generate compliant, context-appropriate content. This paper presents a hybrid architecture that integrates classical machine learning for segmentation, latent intent modeling, and personalization prediction with retrieval-augmented large language models for grounded content generation. A...

Rising environmental awareness in e-commerce necessitates recommender systems that not only guide users to sustainable products but also minimize their own digital carbon footprints. Traditional session-based systems, optimized for short-term conversions, often fail to capture nuanced user intents for eco-friendly choices, perpetuating a gap between green intentions and actions. To tackle this,...

The emergence of large language model (LLM)-based agent frameworks has shifted the primary challenge in building domain-expert AI agents from raw capability to effective encoding of domain expertise. Two dominant paradigms -- code-first development, which embeds expertise in deterministic pipelines, and prompt-first development, which captures expertise in static system prompts -- both treat...

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have stimulated growing interest in agent-based recommender systems, enabling language-driven interaction and reasoning for more expressive preference modeling. However, most existing agentic approaches remain predominantly user-centric, treating items as passive entities and neglecting the interests of other critical stakeholders. This limitation...

Personalized news recommendation is highly time-sensitive, as user interests are often driven by emerging events, trending topics, and shifting real-world contexts. These dynamics make it essential to model not only users' long-term preferences, which reflect stable reading habits and high-order collaborative patterns, but also their short-term, context-dependent interests that change...

Generative Recommender Systems (GR) increasingly model user behavior as a sequence generation task by interleaving item and action tokens. While effective, this formulation introduces significant structural and computational inefficiencies: it doubles sequence length, incurs quadratic overhead, and relies on implicit attention to recover the causal relationship between an item and its associated...

Recent digitisation efforts in natural history museums have produced large volumes of collection data, yet their scale and scientific complexity often hinder public access and understanding. Conventional data management tools, such as databases, restrict exploration through keyword-based search or require specialised schema knowledge. This paper presents a system design that uses conversational...

As social virtual reality (VR) grows more popular, addressing accessibility for blind and low vision (BLV) users is increasingly critical. Researchers have proposed an AI "sighted guide" to help users navigate VR and answer their questions, but it has not been studied with users. To address this gap, we developed a large language model (LLM)-powered guide and studied its use with 16 BLV...

Ranked decision systems -- recommenders, ad auctions, clinical triage queues -- must decide when to intervene in ranked outputs and when to abstain. We study when confidence-based abstention monotonically improves decision quality, and when it fails. The formal conditions are simple: rank-alignment and no inversion zones. The substantive contribution is identifying why these conditions hold or...

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized recommendation agents by providing superior reasoning and flexible decision-making capabilities. However, existing methods mainly follow a passive information acquisition paradigm, where agents either rely on static pre-defined workflows or perform reasoning with constrained information. It limits the agent's ability to identify information...

Large Language Model (LLM) has exhibited strong reasoning ability in text-based contexts across various domains, yet the limitation of context window poses challenges for the model on long-range inference tasks and necessitates a memory storage system. While many current storage approaches have been proposed with episodic notes and graph representations of memory, retrieval methods still...

The rapid emergence of open-source, locally hosted intelligent agents marks a critical inflection point in human-computer interaction. Systems such as OpenClaw demonstrate that Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents can autonomously operate local computing environments, orchestrate workflows, and integrate external tools. However, within the current paradigm, these agents remain conventional...

Pathology underpins modern diagnosis and cancer care, yet its most valuable asset, the accumulated experience encoded in millions of narrative reports, remains largely inaccessible. Although institutions are rapidly digitizing pathology workflows, storing data without effective mechanisms for retrieval and reasoning risks transforming archives into a passive data repository, where institutional...