LinRec: Linear Attention Mechanism for Long-term Sequential Recommender Systems

Transformer models have achieved remarkable success in sequential recommender systems (SRSs). However, computing the attention matrix in traditional dot-product attention mechanisms results in a quadratic complexity with sequence lengths, leading to high computational costs for long-term sequential recommendation. Motivated by the above observation, we propose a novel L2-Normalized Linear Attention for the Transformer-based Sequential Recommender Systems (LinRec), which theoretically improves efficiency while preserving the learning capabilities of the traditional dot-product attention. Specifically, by thoroughly examining the equivalence conditions of efficient attention mechanisms, we show that LinRec possesses linear complexity while preserving the property of attention mechanisms. In addition, we reveal its latent efficiency properties by interpreting the proposed LinRec mechanism through a statistical lens. Extensive experiments are conducted based on two public benchmark datasets, demonstrating that the combination of LinRec and Transformer models achieves comparable or even superior performance than state-of-the-art Transformer-based SRS models while significantly improving time and memory efficiency.

Collaborative Knowledge Fusion: A Novel Approach for Multi-task Recommender Systems via LLMs

Owing to the impressive general intelligence of large language models (LLMs), there has been a growing trend to integrate them into recommender systems to gain a more profound insight into human interests and intentions. Existing LLMs-based recommender systems primarily leverage item attributes and user interaction histories in textual format, improving the single task like rating prediction or explainable recommendation. Nevertheless, these approaches overlook the crucial contribution of traditional collaborative signals in discerning users' profound intentions and disregard the interrelatedness among tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel framework known as CKF, specifically developed to boost multi-task recommendations via personalized collaborative knowledge fusion into LLMs. Specifically, our method synergizes traditional collaborative filtering models to produce collaborative embeddings, subsequently employing the meta-network to construct personalized mapping bridges tailored for each user. Upon mapped, the embeddings are incorporated into meticulously designed prompt templates and then fed into an advanced LLM to represent user interests. To investigate the intrinsic relationship among diverse recommendation tasks, we develop Multi-Lora, a new parameter-efficient approach for multi-task optimization, adept at distinctly segregating task-shared and task-specific information. This method forges a connection between LLMs and recommendation scenarios, while simultaneously enriching the supervisory signal through mutual knowledge transfer among various tasks. Extensive experiments and in-depth robustness analyses across four common recommendation tasks on four large public data sets substantiate the effectiveness and superiority of our framework.

Generating Model Parameters for Controlling: Parameter Diffusion for Controllable Multi-Task Recommendation

Commercial recommender systems face the challenge that task requirements from platforms or users often change dynamically (e.g., varying preferences for accuracy or diversity). Ideally, the model should be re-trained after resetting a new objective function, adapting to these changes in task requirements. However, in practice, the high computational costs associated with retraining make this process impractical for models already deployed to online environments. This raises a new challenging problem: how to efficiently adapt the learning model to different task requirements by controlling model parameters after deployment, without the need for retraining. To address this issue, we propose a novel controllable learning approach via Parameter Diffusion for controllable multi-task Recommendation (PaDiRec), which allows the customization and adaptation of recommendation model parameters to new task requirements without retraining. Specifically, we first obtain the optimized model parameters through adapter tunning based on the feasible task requirements. Then, we utilize the diffusion model as a parameter generator, employing classifier-free guidance in conditional training to learn the distribution of optimized model parameters under various task requirements. Finally, the diffusion model is applied to effectively generate model parameters in a test-time adaptation manner given task requirements. As a model-agnostic approach, PaDiRec can leverage existing recommendation models as backbones to enhance their controllability. Extensive experiments on public datasets and a dataset from a commercial app, indicate that PaDiRec can effectively enhance controllability through efficient model parameter generation. The code is released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PaDiRec-DD13.

Enhancing Sequential Recommendations through Multi-Perspective Reflections and Iteration

Sequence recommendation (SeqRec) aims to predict the next item a user will interact with by understanding user intentions and leveraging collaborative filtering information. Large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in recommendation tasks through prompt-based, fixed reflection libraries, and fine-tuning techniques. However, these methods face challenges, including lack of supervision, inability to optimize reflection sources, inflexibility to diverse user needs, and high computational costs. Despite promising results, current studies primarily focus on reflections of users' explicit preferences (e.g., item titles) while neglecting implicit preferences (e.g., brands) and collaborative filtering information. This oversight hinders the capture of preference shifts and dynamic user behaviors. Additionally, existing approaches lack mechanisms for reflection evaluation and iteration, often leading to suboptimal recommendations. To address these issues, we propose the Mixture of REflectors (MoRE) framework, designed to model and learn dynamic user preferences in SeqRec. Specifically, MoRE introduces three reflectors for generating LLM-based reflections on explicit preferences, implicit preferences, and collaborative signals. Each reflector incorporates a self-improving strategy, termed refining-and-iteration, to evaluate and iteratively update reflections. Furthermore, a meta-reflector employs a contextual bandit algorithm to select the most suitable expert and corresponding reflections for each user's recommendation, effectively capturing dynamic preferences. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MoRE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, requiring less training time and GPU memory compared to other LLM-based approaches in SeqRec.

MobileExperts: A Dynamic Tool-Enabled Agent Team in Mobile Devices

The attainment of autonomous operations in mobile computing devices has consistently been a goal of human pursuit. With the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual Language Models (VLMs), this aspiration is progressively turning into reality. While contemporary research has explored automation of simple tasks on mobile devices via VLMs, there remains significant room for improvement in handling complex tasks and reducing high reasoning costs. In this paper, we introduce MobileExperts, which for the first time introduces tool formulation and multi-agent collaboration to address the aforementioned challenges. More specifically, MobileExperts dynamically assembles teams based on the alignment of agent portraits with the human requirements. Following this, each agent embarks on an independent exploration phase, formulating its tools to evolve into an expert. Lastly, we develop a dual-layer planning mechanism to establish coordinate collaboration among experts. To validate our effectiveness, we design a new benchmark of hierarchical intelligence levels, offering insights into algorithm's capability to address tasks across a spectrum of complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that MobileExperts performs better on all intelligence levels and achieves ~ 22% reduction in reasoning costs, thus verifying the superiority of our design.

Performative Debias with Fair-exposure Optimization Driven by Strategic Agents in Recommender Systems

Data bias, e.g., popularity impairs the dynamics of two-sided markets within recommender systems. This overshadows the less visible but potentially intriguing long-tail items that could capture user interest. Despite the abundance of research surrounding this issue, it still poses challenges and remains a hot topic in academic circles. Along this line, in this paper, we developed a re-ranking approach in dynamic settings with fair-exposure optimization driven by strategic agents. Designed for the producer side, the execution of agents assumes content creators can modify item features based on strategic incentives to maximize their exposure. This iterative process entails an end-to-end optimization, employing differentiable ranking operators that simultaneously target accuracy and fairness. Joint objectives ensure the performance of recommendations while enhancing the visibility of tail items. We also leveraged the performativity nature of predictions to illustrate how strategic learning influences content creators to shift towards fairness efficiently, thereby incentivizing features of tail items. Through comprehensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets, we have substantiated the effectiveness and dominance of the proposed method especially on unveiling the potential of tail items.

Cross-domain Transfer of Valence Preferences via a Meta-optimization Approach

Cross-domain recommendation offers a potential avenue for alleviating data sparsity and cold-start problems. Embedding and mapping, as a classic cross-domain research genre, aims to identify a common mapping function to perform representation transformation between two domains. Nevertheless, previous coarse-grained preference representations, non-personalized mapping functions, and excessive reliance on overlapping users limit their performance, especially in scenarios where overlapping users are sparse. To address aforementioned challenges, we propose a novel cross-domain approach, namely CVPM. CVPM formalizes cross-domain interest transfer as a hybrid architecture of parametric meta-learning and self-supervised learning, which not only transfers user preferences at a finer level, but also enables signal enhancement with the knowledge of non-overlapping users. Specifically, with deep insights into user preferences and valence preference theory, we believe that there exists significant difference between users' positive preferences and negative behaviors, and thus employ differentiated encoders to learn their distributions. In particular, we further utilize the pre-trained model and item popularity to sample pseudo-interaction items to ensure the integrity of both distributions. To guarantee the personalization of preference transfer, we treat each user's mapping as two parts, the common transformation and the personalized bias, where the network used to generate the personalized bias is output by a meta-learner. Furthermore, in addition to the supervised loss for overlapping users, we design contrastive tasks for non-overlapping users from both group and individual-levels to avoid model skew and enhance the semantics of representations. Exhaustive data analysis and extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and advancement of our proposed framework.

Dr.E Bridges Graphs with Large Language Models through Words

Significant efforts have been directed toward integrating powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) with diverse modalities, particularly focusing on the fusion of vision, language, and audio data. However, the graph-structured data, inherently rich in structural and domain-specific knowledge, have not yet been gracefully adapted to LLMs. Existing methods either describe the graph with raw text, suffering the loss of graph structural information, or feed Graph Neural Network (GNN) embeddings directly into LLM at the cost of losing semantic representation. To bridge this gap, we introduce an innovative, end-to-end modality-aligning framework, equipped with a pretrained Dual-Residual Vector Quantized-Variational AutoEncoder (Dr.E). This framework is specifically designed to facilitate token-level alignment with LLMs, enabling an effective translation of the intrinsic `language' of graphs into comprehensible natural language. Our experimental evaluations on standard GNN node classification tasks demonstrate competitive performance against other state-of-the-art approaches. Additionally, our framework ensures interpretability, efficiency, and robustness, with its effectiveness further validated under both fine-tuning and few-shot settings. This study marks the first successful endeavor to achieve token-level alignment between GNNs and LLMs.

LangTopo: Aligning Language Descriptions of Graphs with Tokenized Topological Modeling

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been widely researched in the field of graph machine learning due to their outstanding abilities in language comprehension and learning. However, the significant gap between natural language tasks and topological structure modeling poses a nonnegligible challenge. Specifically, since natural language descriptions are not sufficient for LLMs to understand and process graph-structured data, fine-tuned LLMs perform even worse than some traditional GNN models on graph tasks, lacking inherent modeling capabilities for graph structures. Existing research overly emphasizes LLMs' understanding of semantic information captured by external models, while inadequately exploring graph topological structure modeling, thereby overlooking the genuine capabilities that LLMs lack. Consequently, in this paper, we introduce a new framework, LangTopo, which aligns graph structure modeling with natural language understanding at the token level. LangTopo quantifies the graph structure modeling capabilities of GNNs and LLMs by constructing a codebook for the graph modality and performs consistency maximization. This process aligns the text description of LLM with the topological modeling of GNN, allowing LLM to learn the ability of GNN to capture graph structures, enabling LLM to handle graph-structured data independently. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on multiple datasets.

Enhancing Collaborative Semantics of Language Model-Driven Recommendations via Graph-Aware Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly prominent in the recommendation systems domain. Existing studies usually utilize in-context learning or supervised fine-tuning on task-specific data to align LLMs into recommendations. However, the substantial bias in semantic spaces between language processing tasks and recommendation tasks poses a nonnegligible challenge. Specifically, without the adequate capturing ability of collaborative information, existing modeling paradigms struggle to capture behavior patterns within community groups, leading to LLMs' ineffectiveness in discerning implicit interaction semantic in recommendation scenarios. To address this, we consider enhancing the learning capability of language model-driven recommendation models for structured data, specifically by utilizing interaction graphs rich in collaborative semantics. We propose a Graph-Aware Learning for Language Model-Driven Recommendations (GAL-Rec). GAL-Rec enhances the understanding of user-item collaborative semantics by imitating the intent of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to aggregate multi-hop information, thereby fully exploiting the substantial learning capacity of LLMs to independently address the complex graphs in the recommendation system. Sufficient experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GAL-Rec significantly enhances the comprehension of collaborative semantics, and improves recommendation performance.