Sep 2026· Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence· 0 citations· 28 references
TL;DR
The Hierarchical Semantic Interest Evolution Network (HSIEN), a novel generative-discriminative framework that significantly alleviates modality misalignment and enhances CTR prediction performance through feature complementarity, is proposed.
Abstract
Accurate user behavior modeling is fundamental to the prediction of click-through rates (CTR) in industrial recommendation systems and online advertising. Traditional discriminative models, which rely on isolated ID features, struggle to capture the evolving nature of user intents across multiple channels due to the inherent semantic gap. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer rich semantic understanding to bridge this gap, their direct application faces two main challenges: modality misalignment between continuous semantic representations and discrete item IDs, and prohibitive computational costs that make them unsuitable for real-time inference. To address these issues, we propose the Hierarchical Semantic Interest Evolution Network (HSIEN), a novel generative-discriminative framework. HSIEN leverages an LLM to construct a Markovian state-space model that recursively captures and updates user interests from multi-channel behavior sequences. It then employs a Semantic Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) strategy to aggregate multi-channel signals into hierarchical intent representations, which are encoded as compact dynamic semantic vectors for integration with downstream discriminative models. Extensive experiments on a public dataset and a large-scale industrial dataset demonstrate that HSIEN significantly alleviates modality misalignment and enhances CTR prediction performance through feature complementarity. This work provides a practical and efficient pathway for leveraging LLMs in large-scale recommendation scenarios.
BARGE is proposed, which employs Item Context-Aware Attention (ICA) to restore item-level structure during encoding, and Hierarchical Path Reranking (HPR) together with Dual-Path Decoding (DPD) to suppress semantic drift from two complementary angles during decoding.
This work proposes GUIDER (Generative User Interest Discovery & Explicit Reasoning), a framework that fundamentally decouples intent planning from item matching by reformulating sequential modeling within a rigorous closed-set semantic interest space.
Jin-Ke Wu, Ying-Hao Wu, Shuchang Liu et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
This work proposes a novel Token Selection approach for Preference Optimization in LLM-based sequential Recommendation, i.e., TSPORec, which accurately pinpoints informative tokens throughout the entire textual content to improve recommendation performance.
Wenqiao Zhu, Chao Xu, Haipang Wu et al.· 0 citations
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable general-purpose abilities across a wide range of domains, and these strengths have also been increasingly evidenced in recommender systems. However, existing methods that attempt to integrate collaborative signals into LLMs often fail to preserve their foundational knowledge. This loss is critical in text-rich recommendation, where robust semantic understanding is required to interpret user reviews and item profiles. We propose PALRec, a parameter-preserving augmentation framework that equips an LLM with recommendation capabilities while keeping its original parameters fixed. We first construct evidence-grounded user and item profiles from reviews and use them as concise pseudo-labels for reconstruction. We then introduce lightweight, trainable user and item embedding modules optimized with a multi-task objective that combines next-item prediction and profile reconstruction. These modules are trained jointly to align collaborative signals with the LLM’s semantic space without modifying the backbone. We also employ token-aware loss decomposition and frequency-aware reweighting to stabilize training and mitigate popularity bias. Experiments on public benchmarks show that PALRec consistently outperforms fully fine-tuned counterparts in recommendation accuracy while preserving the LLM’s pre-trained knowledge. This result highlights that maintaining the LLM’s semantic understanding is crucial for effectively exploiting textual information in recommender systems.
Hyunsoo Na, Minseok Gang, Sang-goo Lee et al.· ACM Transactions on Informat...· 0 citations
Predicting the future popularity of information cascades is essential for understanding information diffusion on social media. Despite recent advances, existing methods face two key limitations: they focus primarily on the cascade view while overlooking other information views that drive user engagement, such as textual semantics, visual content, and tabular attributes; and they fail to capture high-order cross-view interactions. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{TFM4POP}, the first framework to introduce tabular foundation models (TFMs) into popularity prediction, leveraging their pre-trained tabular priors to unify the modeling of multiple heterogeneous information views. Specifically, TFM4POP adopts a dual-branch design: the static branch employs a TFM as the feature-encoding backbone that jointly reasons over all static views through in-context learning to produce the static cascade representation, while the dynamic branch captures the continuous-time cascade dynamics with a dedicated Neural-ODE-based encoder. The two representations are then fused via cross-attention for the final prediction. Furthermore, to adapt the TFM to real cascade distributions, we apply parameter-efficient IA3 fine-tuning, achieving performance competitive with or better than full fine-tuning while updating substantially fewer parameters. In addition, we construct a comprehensive multi-view cascade benchmark that covers all four information views. Extensive experiments show that TFM4POP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple datasets and observation settings.
Wenting Zhu, Chenghua Gong, Sanchuan Guo et al.· 0 citations
The Fusion of Layer-wise Exits for Sequential Recommendation (FLEXRec), a discriminative framework that enhances compact LLMs while retaining scalable full-corpus ranking and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among competing methods while remaining highly efficient.
Xurong Liang, Tong Chen, Q. Nguyen et al.· 0 citations
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