Building personalized recommender systems and search experiences is a cornerstone of the modern data mining and applied machine learning (ML) community. Modern online platforms have a confluence of data including user-item interaction graphs, user and item-associated semantics (text, visual content, etc.), and metadata. Recent advancements in generative models and semantic encoders via large language models (LLMs), visual and audio encoders have significantly impacted research in relevant domains, enabling new directions in knowledge discovery and ability of models to better incorporate semantic context. These techniques are quickly advancing in the academic sphere, and adoption in industrial environments is growing. These advances force large questions about the future of search, recommendation and personalized experiences in the future. This workshop bridges the research gap between the use of generative models and recommendation for personalized systems. We will focus on topics spanning the interplay between such models and conventional personalized systems. Building upon the momentum of previous successful forums, we seek to engage a diverse audience from academia and industry, fostering a dialogue that incorporates fresh insights and anticipates over 100 attendees, including key stakeholders in the field.

Building personalized recommender systems is a cornerstone of the modern data mining and applied machine learning (ML) community. Modern online platforms have a confluence of data including user-item interaction graphs, user and item-associated semantics (text, visual content, etc.), and metadata. Recent advancements in generative models and semantic encoders via large language models (LLMs), visual and audio encoders have significantly impacted research in relevant domains, enabling new directions in knowledge discovery and ability of models to better incorporate semantic context. This workshop bridges the research gap between the use of generative models and recommendation for personalized systems. We will focus on topics spanning the interplay between such models and conventional personalized systems.

Personalization is key in understanding user behavior and has been a main focus in the fields of knowledge discovery and information retrieval. Building personalized recommender systems is especially important now due to the vast amount of user-generated textual content, which offers deep insights into user preferences. The recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted research areas, mainly in Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Discovery, giving these models the ability to handle complex tasks and learn context. However, the use of generative models and user-generated text for personalized systems and recommendation is relatively new and has shown some promising results. This workshop is designed to bridge the research gap in these fields and explore personalized applications and recommender systems. We aim to fully leverage generative models to develop AI systems that are not only accurate but also focused on meeting individual user needs. Building upon the momentum of previous successful forums, this workshop seeks to engage a diverse audience from academia and industry, fostering a dialogue that incorporates fresh insights and anticipates over 50 attendees, including key stakeholders in the field.

Response generation is one of the critical components in task-oriented dialog systems.Existing studies have shown that large pre-trained language models can be adapted to this task.The typical paradigm of adapting such extremely large language models would be by fine-tuning on the downstream tasks which is not only time-consuming but also involves significant resources and access to fine-tuning data.Prompting (Schick and Schütze, 2020) has been an alternative to fine-tuning in many NLP tasks.In our work, we explore the idea of using prompting for response generation in task-oriented dialog systems.Specifically, we propose an approach that performs contextual dynamic prompting where the prompts are learnt from dialog contexts.We aim to distill useful prompting signals from the dialog context.On experiments with MultiWOZ 2.2 dataset (Zang et al., 2020), we show that contextual dynamic prompts improve response generation in terms of combined score (Mehri et al., 2019a) by 3 absolute points, and a massive 20 points when dialog states are incorporated.Furthermore, human annotation on these conversations found that agents which incorporate context were preferred over agents with vanilla prefix-tuning.