Currently, short video platforms have become the primary place for individuals to share experiences and obtain information. To better meet users' needs for acquiring information while browsing short videos, some apps have introduced a search entry at the bottom of videos, accompanied with recommended relevant queries. This scenario is known as query recommendation in video-related search, where core task is item-to-query (I2Q) recommendation. As this scenario has only emerged in recent years, there is a notable scarcity of academic research and publicly available datasets in this domain. To address this gap, we systematically examine the challenges associated with this scenario for the first time. Subsequently, we release a large-scale dataset derived from real-world data pertaining to the query recommendation in video- related search on the Kuaishou app (KuaiRS). Presently, existing methods rely on embeddings to calculate similarity for matching short videos with queries, lacking deep interaction between the semantic content and the query. In this paper, we introduce a novel LLM-based framework named GREAT, which guides que ry g ener ation with a trie to address I2Q recommendation in related search. Specifically, we initially gather high-quality queries with high exposure and click-through rate to construct a query-based trie. During training, we enhance the LLM's capability to generate high-quality queries using the query-based trie. In the inference phase, the query-based trie serves as a guide for the token generation. Finally, we further refine the relevance and literal quality between items and queries via a post-processing module. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Optimization metrics are crucial for building recommendation systems at scale. However, an effective and efficient metric for practical use remains elusive. While Top-K ranking metrics are the gold standard for optimization, they suffer from significant computational overhead. Alternatively, the more efficient accuracy and AUC metrics often fall short of capturing the true targets of recommendation tasks, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome this dilemma, we propose a new optimization metric, Lower-Left Partial AUC (LLPAUC), which is computationally efficient like AUC but strongly correlates with Top-K ranking metrics. Compared to AUC, LLPAUC considers only the partial area under the ROC curve in the Lower-Left corner to push the optimization focus on Top-K. We provide theoretical validation of the correlation between LLPAUC and Top-K ranking metrics and demonstrate its robustness to noisy user feedback. We further design an efficient point-wise recommendation loss to maximize LLPAUC and evaluate it on three datasets, validating its effectiveness and robustness.

Sequential recommender models typically generate predictions in a single step during testing, without considering additional prediction correction to enhance performance as humans would. To improve the accuracy of these models, some researchers have attempted to simulate human analogical reasoning to correct predictions for testing data by drawing analogies with the prediction errors of similar training data. However, there are inherent gaps between testing and training data, which can make this approach unreliable. To address this issue, we propose an Abductive Prediction Correction (APC) framework for sequential recommendation. Our approach simulates abductive reasoning to correct predictions. Specifically, we design an abductive reasoning task that infers the most probable historical interactions from the future interactions predicted by a recommender, and minimizes the discrepancy between the inferred and true historical interactions to adjust the predictions. We perform the abductive inference and adjustment using a reversed sequential model in the forward and backward propagation manner of neural networks. Our APC framework is applicable to various differentiable sequential recommender models. We implement it on three backbone models and demonstrate its effectiveness. We release the code at https://github.com/zyang1580/APC.

Historical interactions are the default choice for recommender model training, which typically exhibit high sparsity, i.e., most user-item pairs are unobserved missing data. A standard choice is treating the missing data as negative training samples and estimating interaction likelihood between user-item pairs along with the observed interactions. In this way, some potential interactions are inevitably mislabeled during training, which will hurt the model fidelity, hindering the model to recall the mislabeled items, especially the long-tail ones. In this work, we investigate the mislabeling issue from a new perspective ofaleatoric uncertainty, which describes the inherent randomness of missing data. The randomness pushes us to go beyond merely the interaction likelihood and embrace aleatoric uncertainty modeling. Towards this end, we propose a newAleatoric Uncertainty-aware Recommendation(AUR) framework that consists of a new uncertainty estimator along with a normal recommender model. According to the theory of aleatoric uncertainty, we derive a new recommendation objective to learn the estimator. As the chance of mislabeling reflects the potential of a pair, AUR makes recommendations according to the uncertainty, which is demonstrated to improve the recommendation performance of less popular items without sacrificing the overall performance. We instantiate AUR on three representative recommender models: Matrix Factorization (MF), LightGCN, and VAE from mainstream model architectures. Extensive results on four real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of AUR w.r.t. better recommendation results, especially on long-tail items.

Practical recommender systems need be periodically retrained to refresh the model with new interaction data. To pursue high model fidelity, it is usually desirable to retrain the model on both historical and new data, since it can account for both long-term and short-term user preference. However, a full model retraining could be very time-consuming and memory-costly, especially when the scale of historical data is large. In this work, we study the model retraining mechanism for recommender systems, a topic of high practical values but has been relatively little explored in the research community.