Abstract The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has driven a transformative shift in artificial intelligence (AI), reshaping both research paradigms and practical applications. Distinguished from their predecessors by unprecedented scale and advanced capabilities, LLMs necessitate new frameworks for understanding their development, behavior, and societal impact. This survey systematically reviews recent advancements in LLM techniques across four key dimensions: (1) pre-training methodologies, which establish core model capabilities through large-scale self-supervised training, architectural innovations, and data curation strategies; (2) post-training techniques, including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, which adapt foundational models to downstream tasks and enhance their alignment and safety; (3) utilization strategies, such as in-context learning, prompt engineering, and agentic reasoning, that optimize real-world deployment and enable effective interaction with external environments; and (4) evaluation methods, encompassing benchmarks for key ability dimensions such as core language capabilities, reasoning, and safety, which support comprehensive and reliable assessment of model performance. Additionally, we identify critical research issues, including those concerning theoretical foundations, efficient scaling, alignment, and agentic capability, and highlight the open challenges they present. By synthesizing state-of-the-art insights and emerging trends, this survey aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive framework for understanding the trajectory, current limitations, and future directions of LLM progress.

Automatic prompt optimization is an important approach to improving the performance of large language models (LLMs). Recent research demonstrates the potential of using LLMs as prompt optimizers, which can generate improved task prompts via iterative refinement. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective to investigate the design of LLM-based prompt optimizers, by drawing an analogy with gradient-based model optimizers. To connect these two approaches, we identify two pivotal factors in model parameter learning: update direction and update method. By systematically analyzing a rich set of improvement strategies on the two aspects, we further develop a capable Gradient-inspired LLM-based Prompt Optimizer called GPO. At each step, it first retrieves relevant prompts from the optimization trajectory as the update direction. Then, it utilizes the generation-based refinement strategy to perform the update, while controlling the edit distance through a cosine-based decay strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of GPO. In particular, GPO brings an additional improvement of up to 56.8% on Big-Bench Hard and 62.6% on MMLU compared to baseline methods.

Xinyu Tang, Xiaolei Wang, Zhihao Lv, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Binbin Hu, Ziqi Liu, Zhiqiang Zhang. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been introduced into recommender systems (RSs) as recommendation backbones or to enhance traditional recommendation models (TRMs). However, existing LLM-based RSs fail to fully leverage the complementary strengths of LLMs (e.g., world knowledge and reasoning capabilities) and TRMs (e.g., recommendation-specific knowledge and computational efficiency), resulting in shallow exploration of the item space. To address this limitation, we propose DeepRec, a novel LLM-based RS approach that facilitates autonomous multi-turn interactions between LLMs and TRMs for deep item space exploration. In each interaction turn, LLMs reason over user preferences and collaborate with TRMs to retrieve candidate items. After multi-turn interaction, LLMs rank the aggregated candidates to generate the final recommendations. We utilize reinforcement learning (RL) for optimization and introduce novel contributions in three key aspects: recommendation model based data rollout, recommendation-oriented hierarchical rewards, and a two-stage RL training strategy. For data rollout, we design a preference-aware TRM, with which LLMs interact to construct trajectory data. For reward design, we propose a hierarchical reward function that comprises both process-level and outcome-level rewards to optimize the interaction process and recommendation quality, respectively. For RL training, our two-stage RL strategy first guides LLMs to learn effective interactions with TRMs, followed by recommendation-oriented RL for performance enhancement. Experiments on public datasets show that DeepRec substantially outperforms both traditional and existing LLM-based baselines, establishing a new paradigm for deep exploration in recommender systems.

Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) often rely on extensive manual feature engineering to improve accuracy and user experience, which increases system complexity and limits scalability of model performance with respect to computational resources. Recently, Meta introduced a generative ranking paradigm based on HSTU block that enables end-to-end learning from raw user behavior sequences and demonstrates scaling law on large datasets that can be regarded as the state-of-the-art (SOTA). However, splitting user behaviors into interleaved item and action information significantly increases the input sequence length, which adversely affects both training and inference efficiency. To address this issue, we propose the Twin-Flow Generative Ranking Network (TFGR), that employs a Twin-flow mechanism to optimize interaction modeling, ensuring efficient training and inference through end-to-end token processing. TFGR duplicates the original user behavior sequence into a real flow and a fake flow based on the authenticity of the action information, and then defines a novel interaction method between the real flow and the fake flow within the QKV module of the self-attention mechanism. This design reduces computational overhead and improves both training efficiency and inference performance compared to Meta's HSTU-based model. Experiments on both open-source and real industrial datasets show that TFGR outperforms DLRM, which serves as the industrial online baseline with extensive feature engineering, as well as Meta's HSTU and other common recommendation models such as DIN, DCN, DIEN, and DeepFM. Furthermore, we investigate optimal parameter allocation strategies under computational constraints, establishing TFGR as an efficient and effective next-generation generative ranking paradigm.

The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) is potentially attributed to two major abilities: task recognition (TR) for recognizing the task from demonstrations and utilizing pre-trained priors, and task learning (TL) for learning from demonstrations. However, relationships between the two abilities and how such relationships affect the emergence of ICL is unclear. In this paper, we take the first step by examining the pre-training dynamics of the emergence of ICL. With carefully designed metrics, we find that these two abilities are, in fact, competitive during pre-training. Moreover, we observe a negative correlation between the competition and the performance of ICL. Further analysis of common pre-training factors (i.e., model size, dataset size, and data curriculum) demonstrates possible ways to regulate the competition. Based on these insights, we propose a simple yet effective method to better integrate these two abilities for ICL at inference time. Through adaptive ensemble learning, the performance of ICL can be significantly boosted, enabling two small models to outperform a larger one with more than twice the parameters.

Xinyu Tang, Xiaolei Wang, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Conversational recommendation systems (CRSs) use multi-turn interaction to capture user preferences and provide personalized recommendations. A fundamental challenge in CRSs lies in effectively understanding user preferences from conversations. Previous research primarily focuses on the issue of insufficient contextual information in conversations. They address this by introducing external knowledge sources, such as knowledge graphs, large language models (LLMs), and conversational recommendation corpora. Based on this, they design specific alignment strategies (e.g., prompt learning and instruction tuning) to integrate such knowledge for user preference understanding and item recommendation. However, user preferences can be multifaceted and complex, posing significant challenges for accurate recommendations even with access to abundant external knowledge. While interaction with users can clarify their true preferences, frequent user involvement may lead to a degraded user experience.

Tianyi Tang, Wenyang Luo, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Xiaolei Wang, Xin Zhao, Furu Wei, Ji-Rong Wen. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has shown great potential to develop more powerful conversational recommender systems (CRSs), which rely on natural language conversations to satisfy user needs.In this paper, we embark on an investigation into the utilization of ChatGPT for CRSs, revealing the inadequacy of the existing evaluation protocol.It might overemphasize the matching with ground-truth items annotated by humans while neglecting the interactive nature of CRSs.To overcome the limitation, we further propose an interactive Evaluation approach based on LLMs, named iEvaLM, which harnesses LLM-based user simulators.Our evaluation approach can simulate various system-user interaction scenarios.Through the experiments on two public CRS datasets, we demonstrate notable improvements compared to the prevailing evaluation protocol.Furthermore, we emphasize the evaluation of explainability, and Chat-GPT showcases persuasive explanation generation for its recommendations.Our study contributes to a deeper comprehension of the untapped potential of LLMs for CRSs and provides a more flexible and realistic evaluation approach for future research about LLMbased CRSs.The code is available at https: //github.com/RUCAIBox/iEvaLM-CRS.

Conversational recommender systems~(CRSs) aim to provide recommendation services via natural language conversations. Although a number of approaches have been proposed for developing capable CRSs, they typically rely on sufficient training data for training. Since it is difficult to annotate recommendation-oriented dialogue datasets, existing CRS approaches often suffer from the issue of insufficient training due to the scarcity of training data.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to provide the recommendation service via natural language conversations. To develop an effective CRS, high-quality CRS datasets are very crucial. However, existing CRS datasets suffer from the long-tail issue, i.e., a large proportion of items are rarely (or even never) mentioned in the conversations, which are called long-tail items. As a result, the CRSs trained on these datasets tend to recommend frequent items, and the diversity of the recommended items would be largely reduced, making users easier to get bored.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to proactively elicit user preference and recommend high-quality items through natural language conversations. Typically, a CRS consists of a recommendation module to predict preferred items for users and a conversation module to generate appropriate responses. To develop an effective CRS, it is essential to seamlessly integrate the two modules. Existing works either design semantic alignment strategies, or share knowledge resources and representations between the two modules. However, these approaches still rely on different architectures or techniques to develop the two modules, making it difficult for effective module integration. To address this problem, we propose a unified CRS model named UniCRS based on knowledge-enhanced prompt learning. Our approach unifies the recommendation and conversation subtasks into the prompt learning paradigm, and utilizes knowledge-enhanced prompts based on a fixed pre-trained language model (PLM) to fulfill both subtasks in a unified approach. In the prompt design, we include fused knowledge representations, task-specific soft tokens, and the dialogue context, which can provide sufficient contextual information to adapt the PLM for the CRS task. Besides, for the recommendation subtask, we also incorporate the generated response template as an important part of the prompt, to enhance the information interaction between the two subtasks. Extensive experiments on two public CRS datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is publicly available at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/UniCRS.