cs.IR

arXiv:2501.07294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: [This is a position paper and does not contain any empirical or theoretical results] Recommender systems have become a cornerstone of personalized user experiences, yet their development typically involves significant manual intervention, including dataset-specific feature engineering, hyperparameter tuning, and configuration. To this end, we introduce a novel paradigm: Dataset-Agnostic Recommender Systems (DAReS) that aims to enable a single codebase to autonomously adapt to various datasets without the need for fine-tuning, for a given recommender system task. Central to this approach is the Dataset Description Language (DsDL), a structured format that provides metadata about the dataset's features and labels, and allow the system to understand dataset's characteristics, allowing it to autonomously manage processes like feature selection, missing values imputation, noise removal, and hyperparameter optimization. By reducing the need for domain-specific expertise and manual adjustments, DAReS offers a more efficient and scalable solution for building recommender systems across diverse application domains. It addresses critical challenges in the field, such as reusability, reproducibility, and accessibility for non-expert users or entry-level researchers.

arXiv:2311.04549v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Feature-based knowledge distillation has been applied to compress modern recommendation models, usually with projectors that align student (small) recommendation models' dimensions with teacher dimensions. However, existing studies have only focused on making the projected features (i.e., student features after projectors) similar to teacher features, overlooking investigating whether the user preference can be transferred to student features (i.e., student features before projectors) in this manner. In this paper, we find that due to the lack of restrictions on projectors, the process of transferring user preferences will likely be interfered with. We refer to this phenomenon as preference inconsistency. It greatly wastes the power of feature-based knowledge distillation. To mitigate preference inconsistency, we propose PCKD, which consists of two regularization terms for projectors. We also propose a hybrid method that combines the two regularization terms. We focus on items with high preference scores and significantly mitigate preference inconsistency, improving the performance of feature-based knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments on three public datasets and three backbones demonstrate the effectiveness of PCKD. The code of our method is provided in https://github.com/woriazzc/KDs.

arXiv:2501.07212v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Securing long-term success is the ultimate aim of recommender systems, demanding strategies capable of foreseeing and shaping the impact of decisions on future user satisfaction. Current recommendation strategies grapple with two significant hurdles. Firstly, the future impacts of recommendation decisions remain obscured, rendering it impractical to evaluate them through direct optimization of immediate metrics. Secondly, conflicts often emerge between multiple objectives, like enhancing accuracy versus exploring diverse recommendations. Existing strategies, trapped in a "training, evaluation, and retraining" loop, grow more labor-intensive as objectives evolve. To address these challenges, we introduce a future-conditioned strategy for multi-objective controllable recommendations, allowing for the direct specification of future objectives and empowering the model to generate item sequences that align with these goals autoregressively. We present the Multi-Objective Controllable Decision Transformer (MocDT), an offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) model capable of autonomously learning the mapping from multiple objectives to item sequences, leveraging extensive offline data. Consequently, it can produce recommendations tailored to any specified objectives during the inference stage. Our empirical findings emphasize the controllable recommendation strategy's ability to produce item sequences according to different objectives while maintaining performance that is competitive with current recommendation strategies across various objectives.

arXiv:2501.06833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In English literature, the 19th century witnessed a significant transition in styles, themes, and genres. Consequently, the novels from this period display remarkable diversity. This paper explores these variations by examining the evolution of term usage in 19th century English novels through the lens of information retrieval. By applying a query expansion-based approach to a decade-segmented collection of fiction from the British Library, we examine how related terms vary over time. Our analysis employs multiple standard metrics including Kendall's tau, Jaccard similarity, and Jensen-Shannon divergence to assess overlaps and shifts in expanded query term sets. Our results indicate a significant degree of divergence in the related terms across decades as selected by the query expansion technique, suggesting substantial linguistic and conceptual changes throughout the 19th century novels.

arXiv:2501.07365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Semantic retrieval (also known as dense retrieval) based on textual data has been extensively studied for both web search and product search application fields, where the relevance of a query and a potential target document is computed by their dense vector representation comparison. Product image is crucial for e-commence search interactions and is a key factor for customers at product explorations. But its impact for semantic retrieval has not been well studied yet. In this research, we build a multimodal representation for product items in e-commerece search in contrast to pure-text representation of products, and investigate the impact of such representations. The models are developed and evaluated on e-commerce datasets. We demonstrate that a multimodal representation scheme for a product can show improvement either on purchase recall or relevance accuracy in semantic retrieval. Additionally, we provide numerical analysis for exclusive matches retrieved by a multimodal semantic retrieval model versus a text-only semantic retrieval model, to demonstrate the validation of multimodal solutions.

arXiv:2501.06873v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze over 44,000 NBER and CEPR working papers from 1980 to 2023 using a custom language model to construct knowledge graphs that map economic concepts and their relationships. We distinguish between general claims and those documented via causal inference methods (e.g., DiD, IV, RDD, RCTs). We document a substantial rise in the share of causal claims-from roughly 4% in 1990 to nearly 28% in 2020-reflecting the growing influence of the "credibility revolution." We find that causal narrative complexity (e.g., the depth of causal chains) strongly predicts both publication in top-5 journals and higher citation counts, whereas non-causal complexity tends to be uncorrelated or negatively associated with these outcomes. Novelty is also pivotal for top-5 publication, but only when grounded in credible causal methods: introducing genuinely new causal edges or paths markedly increases both the likelihood of acceptance at leading outlets and long-run citations, while non-causal novelty exhibits weak or even negative effects. Papers engaging with central, widely recognized concepts tend to attract more citations, highlighting a divergence between factors driving publication success and long-term academic impact. Finally, bridging underexplored concept pairs is rewarded primarily when grounded in causal methods, yet such gap filling exhibits no consistent link with future citations. Overall, our findings suggest that methodological rigor and causal innovation are key drivers of academic recognition, but sustained impact may require balancing novel contributions with conceptual integration into established economic discourse.

arXiv:2501.07096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recommender systems aim to provide personalized item recommendations by capturing user behaviors derived from their interaction history. Considering that user interactions naturally occur sequentially based on users' intents in mind, user behaviors can be interpreted as user intents. Therefore, intent-based sequential recommendations are actively studied recently to model user intents from historical interactions for a more precise user understanding beyond traditional studies that often overlook the underlying semantics behind user interactions. However, existing studies face three challenges: 1) the limited understanding of user behaviors by focusing solely on intents, 2) the lack of robustness in categorizing intents due to arbitrary fixed numbers of intent categories, and 3) the neglect of interacted items in modeling of user intents. To address these challenges, we propose Intent-Interest Disentanglement and Item-Aware Intent Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (IDCLRec). IDCLRec disentangles user behaviors into intents which are dynamic motivations and interests which are stable tastes of users for a comprehensive understanding of user behaviors. A causal cross-attention mechanism is used to identify consistent interests across interactions, while residual behaviors are modeled as intents by modeling their temporal dynamics through a similarity adjustment loss. In addition, without predefining the number of intent categories, an importance-weighted attention mechanism captures user-specific categorical intent considering the importance of intent for each interaction. Furthermore, we introduce item-aware contrastive learning which aligns intents that occurred the same interaction and aligns intent with item combinations occurred by the corresponding intent. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of IDCLRec.

arXiv:2501.07111v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reranker models aim to re-rank the passages based on the semantics similarity between the given query and passages, which have recently received more attention due to the wide application of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Most previous methods apply pointwise encoding, meaning that it can only encode the context of the query for each passage input into the model. However, for the reranker model, given a query, the comparison results between passages are even more important, which is called listwise encoding. Besides, previous models are trained using the cross-entropy loss function, which leads to issues of unsmooth gradient changes during training and low training efficiency. To address these issues, we propose a novel Listwise-encoded Contrastive text reRanker (ListConRanker). It can help the passage to be compared with other passages during the encoding process, and enhance the contrastive information between positive examples and between positive and negative examples. At the same time, we use the circle loss to train the model to increase the flexibility of gradients and solve the problem of training efficiency. Experimental results show that ListConRanker achieves state-of-the-art performance on the reranking benchmark of Chinese Massive Text Embedding Benchmark, including the cMedQA1.0, cMedQA2.0, MMarcoReranking, and T2Reranking datasets.

arXiv:2501.06581v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prospective students face the challenging task of selecting a university program that will shape their academic and professional careers. For decision-makers and support services, it is often time-consuming and extremely difficult to match personal interests with suitable programs due to the vast and complex catalogue information available. This paper presents the first information system that provides students with efficient recommendations based on both program content and personal preferences. BERTopic, a powerful topic modeling algorithm, is used that leverages text embedding techniques to generate topic representations. It enables us to mine interest topics from all course descriptions, representing the full body of knowledge taught at the institution. Underpinned by the student's individual choice of topics, a shortlist of the most relevant programs is computed through statistical backtracking in the knowledge map, a novel characterization of the program-course relationship. This approach can be applied to a wide range of educational settings, including professional and vocational training. A case study at a post-secondary school with 80 programs and over 5,000 courses shows that the system provides immediate and effective decision support. The presented interest topics are meaningful, leading to positive effects such as serendipity, personalization, and fairness, as revealed by a qualitative study involving 65 students. Over 98% of users indicated that the recommendations aligned with their interests, and about 94% stated they would use the tool in the future. Quantitative analysis shows the system can be configured to ensure fairness, achieving 98% program coverage while maintaining a personalization score of 0.77. These findings suggest that this real-time, user-centered, data-driven system could improve the program selection process.

arXiv:2501.06699v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Much has been discussed about how Large Language Models, Knowledge Graphs and Search Engines can be combined in a synergistic manner. A dimension largely absent from current academic discourse is the user perspective. In particular, there remain many open questions regarding how best to address the diverse information needs of users, incorporating varying facets and levels of difficulty. This paper introduces a taxonomy of user information needs, which guides us to study the pros, cons and possible synergies of Large Language Models, Knowledge Graphs and Search Engines. From this study, we derive a roadmap for future research.

arXiv:2501.06365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a pipeline for mitigating gender bias in large language models (LLMs) used in medical literature by neutralizing gendered occupational pronouns. A dataset of 379,000 PubMed abstracts from 1965-1980 was processed to identify and modify pronouns tied to professions. We developed a BERT-based model, ``Modern Occupational Bias Elimination with Refined Training,'' or ``MOBERT,'' trained on these neutralized abstracts, and compared its performance with ``1965Bert,'' trained on the original dataset. MOBERT achieved a 70\% inclusive replacement rate, while 1965Bert reached only 4\%. A further analysis of MOBERT revealed that pronoun replacement accuracy correlated with the frequency of occupational terms in the training data. We propose expanding the dataset and refining the pipeline to improve performance and ensure more equitable language modeling in medical applications.

arXiv:2501.07063v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the contemporary context of rapid advancements in information technology and the exponential growth of data volume, language models are confronted with significant challenges in effectively navigating the dynamic and ever-evolving information landscape to update and adapt to novel knowledge in real time. In this work, an online update method is proposed, which is based on the existing Retrieval Enhanced Generation (RAG) model with multiple innovation mechanisms. Firstly, the dynamic memory is used to capture the emerging data samples, and then gradually integrate them into the core model through a tunable knowledge distillation strategy. At the same time, hierarchical indexing and multi-layer gating mechanism are introduced into the retrieval module to ensure that the retrieved content is more targeted and accurate. Finally, a multi-stage network structure is established for different types of inputs in the generation stage, and cross-attention matching and screening are carried out on the intermediate representations of each stage to ensure the effective integration and iterative update of new and old knowledge. Experimental results show that the proposed method is better than the existing mainstream comparison models in terms of knowledge retention and inference accuracy.

arXiv:2501.07024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study presents a novel framework for smart search in digital archival systems, leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance information retrieval. By employing a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach, the framework enables the processing of natural language queries and transforming non-textual data into meaningful textual representations. The system integrates advanced metadata generation techniques, a hybrid retrieval mechanism, a router query engine, and robust response synthesis, the results proved search precision and relevance. We present the architecture and implementation of the system and evaluate its performance in four experiments concerning LLM efficiency, hybrid retrieval optimizations, multilingual query handling, and the impacts of individual components. Obtained results show significant improvements over conventional approaches and have demonstrated the potential of AI-powered systems to transform modern archival practices.

arXiv:2501.06985v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In business analysis, providing effective recommendations is essential for enhancing company profits. The utilization of graph-based structures, such as bipartite graphs, has gained popularity for their ability to analyze complex data relationships. Link prediction is crucial for recommending specific items to users. Traditional methods in this area often involve identifying patterns in the graph structure or using representational techniques like graph neural networks (GNNs). However, these approaches encounter difficulties as the volume of data increases. To address these challenges, we propose a model called Graph Contrastive Learning for Multi-label Classification (MCGCL). MCGCL leverages contrastive learning to enhance recommendation effectiveness. The model incorporates two training stages: a main task and a subtask. The main task is holistic user-item graph learning to capture user-item relationships. The homogeneous user-user (item-item) subgraph is constructed to capture user-user and item-item relationships in the subtask. We assessed the performance using real-world datasets from Amazon Reviews in multi-label classification tasks. Comparative experiments with state-of-the-art methods confirm the effectiveness of MCGCL, highlighting its potential for improving recommendation systems.

arXiv:2501.06496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study evaluates the forecasting performance of recent language models (LLMs) on binary forecasting questions. We first introduce a novel dataset of over 600 binary forecasting questions, augmented with related news articles and their concise question-related summaries. We then explore the impact of input prompts with varying level of context on forecasting performance. The results indicate that incorporating news articles significantly improves performance, while using few-shot examples leads to a decline in accuracy. We find that larger models consistently outperform smaller models, highlighting the potential of LLMs in enhancing automated forecasting.

arXiv:2501.06956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the rapidly evolving landscape of technological innovation, safeguarding intellectual property rights through patents is crucial for fostering progress and stimulating research and development investments. This report introduces a ground-breaking Patent Novelty Assessment and Claim Generation System, meticulously crafted to dissect the inventive aspects of intellectual property and simplify access to extensive patent claim data. Addressing a crucial gap in academic institutions, our system provides college students and researchers with an intuitive platform to navigate and grasp the intricacies of patent claims, particularly tailored for the nuances of Chinese patents. Unlike conventional analysis systems, our initiative harnesses a proprietary Chinese API to ensure unparalleled precision and relevance. The primary challenge lies in the complexity of accessing and comprehending diverse patent claims, inhibiting effective innovation upon existing ideas. Our solution aims to overcome these barriers by offering a bespoke approach that seamlessly retrieves comprehensive claim information, finely tuned to the specifics of the Chinese patent landscape. By equipping users with efficient access to comprehensive patent claim information, our transformative platform seeks to ignite informed exploration and innovation in the ever-evolving domain of intellectual property. Its envisioned impact transcends individual colleges, nurturing an environment conducive to research and development while deepening the understanding of patented concepts within the academic community.

arXiv:2501.06277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI holds significant potential for ecological and environmental applications such as monitoring, data analysis, education, and policy support. However, its effectiveness is limited by the lack of a unified evaluation framework. To address this, we present the Environmental Large Language model Evaluation (ELLE) question answer (QA) dataset, the first benchmark designed to assess large language models and their applications in ecological and environmental sciences. The ELLE dataset includes 1,130 question answer pairs across 16 environmental topics, categorized by domain, difficulty, and type. This comprehensive dataset standardizes performance assessments in these fields, enabling consistent and objective comparisons of generative AI performance. By providing a dedicated evaluation tool, ELLE dataset promotes the development and application of generative AI technologies for sustainable environmental outcomes. The dataset and code are available at https://elle.ceeai.net/ and https://github.com/CEEAI/elle.

arXiv:2501.07110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal information (e.g., visual, acoustic, and textual) has been widely used to enhance representation learning for micro-video recommendation. For integrating multimodal information into a joint representation of micro-video, multimodal fusion plays a vital role in the existing micro-video recommendation approaches. However, the static multimodal fusion used in previous studies is insufficient to model the various relationships among multimodal information of different micro-videos. In this paper, we develop a novel meta-learning-based multimodal fusion framework called Meta Multimodal Fusion (MetaMMF), which dynamically assigns parameters to the multimodal fusion function for each micro-video during its representation learning. Specifically, MetaMMF regards the multimodal fusion of each micro-video as an independent task. Based on the meta information extracted from the multimodal features of the input task, MetaMMF parameterizes a neural network as the item-specific fusion function via a meta learner. We perform extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, demonstrating the significant improvements over several state-of-the-art multimodal recommendation models, like MMGCN, LATTICE, and InvRL. Furthermore, we lighten our model by adopting canonical polyadic decomposition to improve the training efficiency, and validate its effectiveness through experimental results. Codes are available at https://github.com/hanliu95/MetaMMF.

arXiv:2501.06362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In next basket recommendation (NBR) a set of items is recommended to users based on their historical basket sequences. In many domains, the recommended baskets consist of both repeat items and explore items. Some state-of-the-art NBR methods are heavily biased to recommend repeat items so as to maximize utility. The evaluation and optimization of beyond-accuracy objectives for NBR, such as item fairness and diversity, has attracted increasing attention. How can such beyond-accuracy objectives be pursued in the presence of heavy repeat bias? We find that only optimizing diversity or item fairness without considering repeat bias may cause NBR algorithms to recommend more repeat items. To solve this problem, we propose a model-agnostic repeat-bias-aware optimization algorithm to post-process the recommended results obtained from NBR methods with the objective of mitigating repeat bias when optimizing diversity or item fairness. We consider multiple variations of our optimization algorithm to cater to multiple NBR methods. Experiments on three real-world grocery shopping datasets show that the proposed algorithms can effectively improve diversity and item fairness, and mitigate repeat bias at acceptable Recall loss.

arXiv:2402.01339v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The sequential recommendation problem has attracted considerable research attention in the past few years, leading to the rise of numerous recommendation models. In this work, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs), which are nowadays introducing disruptive effects in many AI-based applications, can be used to build or improve sequential recommendation approaches. Specifically, we design three orthogonal approaches and hybrids of those to leverage the power of LLMs in different ways. In addition, we investigate the potential of each approach by focusing on its comprising technical aspects and determining an array of alternative choices for each one. We conduct extensive experiments on three datasets and explore a large variety of configurations, including different language models and baseline recommendation models, to obtain a comprehensive picture of the performance of each approach. Among other observations, we highlight that initializing state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models such as BERT4Rec or SASRec with embeddings obtained from an LLM can lead to substantial performance gains in terms of accuracy. Furthermore, we find that fine-tuning an LLM for recommendation tasks enables it to learn not only the tasks, but also concepts of a domain to some extent. We also show that fine-tuning OpenAI GPT leads to considerably better performance than fine-tuning Google PaLM 2. Overall, our extensive experiments indicate a huge potential value of leveraging LLMs in future recommendation approaches. We publicly share the code and data of our experiments to ensure reproducibility.