Federated In-Context Learning: Iterative Refinement for Improved Answer Quality

For question-answering (QA) tasks, in-context learning (ICL) enables language models to generate responses without modifying their parameters by leveraging examples provided in the input. However, the effectiveness of ICL heavily depends on the availability of high-quality examples, which are often scarce due to data privacy constraints, annotation costs, and distribution disparities. A natural solution is to utilize examples stored on client devices, but existing approaches either require transmitting model parameters - incurring significant communication overhead - or fail to fully exploit local datasets, limiting their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose Federated In-Context Learning (Fed-ICL), a general framework that enhances ICL through an iterative, collaborative process. Fed-ICL progressively refines responses by leveraging multi-round interactions between clients and a central server, improving answer quality without the need to transmit model parameters. We establish theoretical guarantees for the convergence of Fed-ICL and conduct extensive experiments on standard QA benchmarks, demonstrating that our proposed approach achieves strong performance while maintaining low communication costs.

Counterfactual Inference for Eliminating Sentiment Bias in Recommender Systems

Recommender Systems (RSs) aim to provide personalized recommendations for users. A newly discovered bias, known as sentiment bias, uncovers a common phenomenon within Review-based RSs (RRSs): the recommendation accuracy of users or items with negative reviews deteriorates compared with users or items with positive reviews. Critical users and niche items are disadvantaged by such unfair recommendations. We study this problem from the perspective of counterfactual inference with two stages. At the model training stage, we build a causal graph and model how sentiment influences the final rating score. During the inference stage, we decouple the direct and indirect effects to mitigate the impact of sentiment bias and remove the indirect effect using counterfactual inference. We have conducted extensive experiments, and the results validate that our model can achieve comparable performance on rating prediction for better recommendations and effective mitigation of sentiment bias. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to employ counterfactual inference on sentiment bias mitigation in RSs.

A Survey of Foundation Model-Powered Recommender Systems: From Feature-Based, Generative to Agentic Paradigms

Recommender systems (RS) have become essential in filtering information and personalizing content for users. RS techniques have traditionally relied on modeling interactions between users and items as well as the features of content using models specific to each task. The emergence of foundation models (FMs), large scale models trained on vast amounts of data such as GPT, LLaMA and CLIP, is reshaping the recommendation paradigm. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the Foundation Models for Recommender Systems (FM4RecSys), covering their integration in three paradigms: (1) Feature-Based augmentation of representations, (2) Generative recommendation approaches, and (3) Agentic interactive systems. We first review the data foundations of RS, from traditional explicit or implicit feedback to multimodal content sources. We then introduce FMs and their capabilities for representation learning, natural language understanding, and multi-modal reasoning in RS contexts. The core of the survey discusses how FMs enhance RS under different paradigms. Afterward, we examine FM applications in various recommendation tasks. Through an analysis of recent research, we highlight key opportunities that have been realized as well as challenges encountered. Finally, we outline open research directions and technical challenges for next-generation FM4RecSys. This survey not only reviews the state-of-the-art methods but also provides a critical analysis of the trade-offs among the feature-based, the generative, and the agentic paradigms, outlining key open issues and future research directions.

Towards Agentic Recommender Systems in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of agentic AI systems that extend beyond the capabilities of standalone models. By empowering LLMs to perceive external environments, integrate multimodal information, and interact with various tools, these agentic systems exhibit greater autonomy and adaptability across complex tasks. This evolution brings new opportunities to recommender systems (RS): LLM-based Agentic RS (LLM-ARS) can offer more interactive, context-aware, and proactive recommendations, potentially reshaping the user experience and broadening the application scope of RS. Despite promising early results, fundamental challenges remain, including how to effectively incorporate external knowledge, balance autonomy with controllability, and evaluate performance in dynamic, multimodal settings. In this perspective paper, we first present a systematic analysis of LLM-ARS: (1) clarifying core concepts and architectures; (2) highlighting how agentic capabilities -- such as planning, memory, and multimodal reasoning -- can enhance recommendation quality; and (3) outlining key research questions in areas such as safety, efficiency, and lifelong personalization. We also discuss open problems and future directions, arguing that LLM-ARS will drive the next wave of RS innovation. Ultimately, we foresee a paradigm shift toward intelligent, autonomous, and collaborative recommendation experiences that more closely align with users' evolving needs and complex decision-making processes.

Dual Contrastive Transformer for Hierarchical Preference Modeling in Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommender systems (SRSs) aim to predict the subsequent items which may interest users via comprehensively modeling users' complex preference embedded in the sequence of user-item interactions. However, most of existing SRSs often model users' single low-level preference based on item ID information while ignoring the high-level preference revealed by item attribute information, such as item category. Furthermore, they often utilize limited sequence context information to predict the next item while overlooking richer inter-item semantic relations. To this end, in this paper, we proposed a novel hierarchical preference modeling framework to substantially model the complex low- and high-level preference dynamics for accurate sequential recommendation. Specifically, in the framework, a novel dual-transformer module and a novel dual contrastive learning scheme have been designed to discriminatively learn users' low- and high-level preference and to effectively enhance both low- and high-level preference learning respectively. In addition, a novel semantics-enhanced context embedding module has been devised to generate more informative context embedding for further improving the recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets have demonstrated both the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art ones and the rationality of our design.

Modeling Temporal Positive and Negative Excitation for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation aims to predict the next item which interests users via modeling their interest in items over time. Most of the existing works on sequential recommendation model users' dynamic interest in specific items while overlooking users' static interest revealed by some static attribute information of items, e.g., category, or brand. Moreover, existing works often only consider the positive excitation of a user's historical interactions on his/her next choice on candidate items while ignoring the commonly existing negative excitation, resulting in insufficient modeling dynamic interest. The overlook of static interest and negative excitation will lead to incomplete interest modeling and thus impede the recommendation performance. To this end, in this paper, we propose modeling both static interest and negative excitation for dynamic interest to further improve the recommendation performance. Accordingly, we design a novel Static-Dynamic Interest Learning (SDIL) framework featured with a novel Temporal Positive and Negative Excitation Modeling (TPNE) module for accurate sequential recommendation. TPNE is specially designed for comprehensively modeling dynamic interest based on temporal positive and negative excitation learning. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that SDIL can effectively capture both static and dynamic interest and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Dual Conditional Diffusion Models for Sequential Recommendation

Recent advancements in diffusion models have shown promising results in sequential recommendation (SR). However, current diffusion-based methods still exhibit two key limitations. First, they implicitly model the diffusion process for target item embeddings rather than the discrete target item itself, leading to inconsistency in the recommendation process. Second, existing methods rely on either implicit or explicit conditional diffusion models, limiting their ability to fully capture the context of user behavior and leading to less robust target item embeddings. In this paper, we propose the Dual Conditional Diffusion Models for Sequential Recommendation (DCRec), introducing a discrete-to-continuous sequential recommendation diffusion framework. Our framework introduces a complete Markov chain to model the transition from the reversed target item representation to the discrete item index, bridging the discrete and continuous item spaces for diffusion models and ensuring consistency with the diffusion framework. Building on this framework, we present the Dual Conditional Diffusion Transformer (DCDT) that incorporates the implicit conditional and the explicit conditional for diffusion-based SR. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that DCRec outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Learn When to Trust Language Models: A Privacy-Centric Adaptive Model-Aware Approach

Retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) have been remarkably competent in various NLP tasks. Despite their great success, the knowledge provided by the retrieval process is not always useful for improving the model prediction, since in some samples LLMs may already be quite knowledgeable and thus be able to answer the question correctly without retrieval. Aiming to save the cost of retrieval, previous work has proposed to determine when to do/skip the retrieval in a data-aware manner by analyzing the LLMs' pretraining data. However, these data-aware methods pose privacy risks and memory limitations, especially when requiring access to sensitive or extensive pretraining data. Moreover, these methods offer limited adaptability under fine-tuning or continual learning settings. We hypothesize that token embeddings are able to capture the model's intrinsic knowledge, which offers a safer and more straightforward way to judge the need for retrieval without the privacy risks associated with accessing pre-training data. Moreover, it alleviates the need to retain all the data utilized during model pre-training, necessitating only the upkeep of the token embeddings. Extensive experiments and in-depth analyses demonstrate the superiority of our model-aware approach.

Foundation Models for Recommender Systems: A Survey and New Perspectives

Recently, Foundation Models (FMs), with their extensive knowledge bases and complex architectures, have offered unique opportunities within the realm of recommender systems (RSs). In this paper, we attempt to thoroughly examine FM-based recommendation systems (FM4RecSys). We start by reviewing the research background of FM4RecSys. Then, we provide a systematic taxonomy of existing FM4RecSys research works, which can be divided into four different parts including data characteristics, representation learning, model type, and downstream tasks. Within each part, we review the key recent research developments, outlining the representative models and discussing their characteristics. Moreover, we elaborate on the open problems and opportunities of FM4RecSys aiming to shed light on future research directions in this area. In conclusion, we recap our findings and discuss the emerging trends in this field.

Interventional Recommendation with Contrastive Counterfactual Learning for Better Understanding User Preferences

Recently, there has been a surging interest in formulating recommendations in the context of causal inference. The studies regard the recommendation as an intervention in causal inference and frame the users' preferences as interventional effects to improve recommender systems' generalization. Many studies in the field of causal inference for recommender systems have been focusing on utilizing propensity scores from the causal community that reduce the bias while inducing additional variance. Alternatively, some studies suggest the existence of a set of unbiased data from randomized controlled trials while it requires to satisfy certain assumptions that may be challenging in practice. In this paper, we first design a causal graph representing recommender systems' data generation and propagation process. Then, we reveal that the underlying exposure mechanism biases the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) on observational feedback. In order to figure out users' preferences in terms of causality behind data, we leverage the back-door adjustment and do-calculus, which induces an interventional recommendation model (IREC). Furthermore, considering the confounder may be inaccessible for measurement, we propose a contrastive counterfactual learning method (CCL) for simulating the intervention. In addition, we present two extra novel sampling strategies and show an intriguing finding that sampling from counterfactual sets contributes to superior performance. We perform extensive experiments on two real-world datasets to evaluate and analyze the performance of our model IREC-CCL on unbiased test sets. Experimental results demonstrate our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.