Search and recommendation (S&R) are fundamental components of modern commercial platforms, enabling users to access and explore information efficiently. User behaviors in these scenarios reflect different aspects of user intent, providing an opportunity for joint modeling of S&R. However, effectively leveraging search logs to enhance recommendation remains a challenging task. Existing methods often encode S&R histories either jointly or separately; however, they tend to regard all search signals as equally informative, thereby neglecting that many search behaviors can be irrelevant or even detrimental to recommendation performance. In practice, however, search histories frequently contain noisy or outdated behaviors that may introduce spurious correlations and degrade recommendation performance. Motivated by the human decision-making process, where one first identifies recommendation intent and then selectively reasons about relevant search signals, we propose LCR-SER, a latent cross reasoning method for search-enhanced recommendation. LCR-SER first encodes the user's S&R history into a unified latent representation that captures users' global interests. It then performs iterative reasoning in the latent space to dynamically identify informative search signals that are most relevant to the recommendation. To further guide this reasoning process, we introduce contrastive learning to align the reasoning states with the target items. In addition, we employ reinforcement learning to directly optimize ranking-oriented metrics, enabling LCR-SER to refine its reasoning strategy toward improved recommendation performance. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that LCR-SER consistently outperforms strong baselines, validating the effectiveness of latent reasoning in enhancing search-aware recommendation.

Question and answer (Q&A) platforms usually recommend question-answer pairs to meet users' knowledge acquisition needs, unlike traditional recommendations that recommend only one item. This makes user behaviors more complex, and presents two challenges for Q&A recommendation, including: the collaborative information entanglement, which means user feedback is influenced by either the question or the answer; and the semantic information entanglement, where questions are correlated with their corresponding answers, and correlations also exist among different question-answer pairs. Traditional recommendation methods treat the question-answer pair as a whole or only consider the answer as a single item, which overlooks the two challenges and cannot effectively model user interests. To address these challenges, we introduce a graph neural network model named Question & Answer Graph Collaborative Filtering (QAGCF). QAGCF creates graphs separately from collaborative and semantic views to disentangle the collaborative and semantic information of question-answer pairs. The collaborative view disentangles questions and answers to individually model collaborative information, while the semantic view captures the semantic information both within and between question-answer pairs. These views are further merged into a global graph to integrate the collaborative and semantic information. Polynomial-based graph filters are used to address the high heterophily issues of the global graph. Additionally, contrastive learning is utilized to obtain robust embeddings during training. Extensive experiments on industrial and public datasets demonstrate that QAGCF consistently outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results.

Sequential Recommendation (SeqRec) aims to predict the next item by capturing sequential patterns from users' historical interactions, playing a crucial role in many real-world recommender systems. However, existing approaches predominantly adopt a direct forward computation paradigm, where the final hidden state of the sequence encoder serves as the user representation. We argue that this inference paradigm, due to its limited computational depth, struggles to model the complex evolving nature of user preferences and lacks a nuanced understanding of long-tail items, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose ReaRec, the first inference-time computing framework for recommender systems, which enhances user representations through implicit multi step reasoning. Specifically, ReaRecautoregressively feeds the sequence's last hidden state into the sequential recommender while incorporating special reasoning position embeddings to decouple the original item encoding space from the multi step reasoning space. Moreover, we introduce two lightweight reasoning-based learning methods, Ensemble Reasoning Learning (ERL) and Progressive Reasoning Learning (PRL), to further effectively exploit ReaRec's reasoning potential. Extensive experiments on five public real-world datasets and different SeqRec architectures demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our proposed ReaRec. Remarkably, post-hoc analyses reveal that ReaRec significantly elevates the performance ceiling of multiple sequential recommendation backbones by approximately 30% 50%. Thus, we believe this work can open a new and promising avenue for future research in inference-time computing for sequential recommendation. The source code is available at https://github.com/TangJiakai/ReaRec.git.

In modern online platforms, search and recommendation (S&R) often coexist, offering opportunities for performance improvement through search-enhanced approaches. Existing studies show that incorporating search signals boosts recommendation performance. However, the effectiveness of these methods relies heavily on rich search interactions. They primarily benefit a small subset of users with abundant search behavior, while offering limited improvements for the majority of users who exhibit only sparse search activity. To address the problem of sparse search data in search-enhanced recommendation, we face two key challenges : (1) how to learn useful search features for users with sparse search interactions, and (2) how to design effective training objectives under sparse conditions. Our idea is to leverage the features of users with rich search interactions to enhance those of users with sparse search interactions. Based on this idea, we propose GSERec, a method that utilizes message passing on the User-Code Graphs to alleviate data sparsity in Search-Enhanced Recommendation. Specifically, we utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) with vector quantization to generate discrete codes, which connect similar users and thereby construct the graph. Through message passing on this graph, embeddings of users with rich search data are propagated to enhance the embeddings of users with sparse interactions. To further ensure that the message passing captures meaningful information from truly similar users, we introduce a contrastive loss to better model user similarities. The enhanced user representations are then integrated into downstream search-enhanced recommendation models. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that GSERec consistently outperforms baselines, especially for users with sparse search behaviors.

Personalized retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) aims to produce user-tailored responses by incorporating retrieved user profiles alongside the input query. Existing methods primarily focus on improving retrieval and rely on large language models (LLMs) to implicitly integrate the retrieved context with the query. However, such models are often sensitive to retrieval quality and may generate responses that are misaligned with user preferences. To address this limitation, we propose PrLM, a reinforcement learning framework that trains LLMs to explicitly reason over retrieved user profiles. Guided by a contrastively trained personalization reward model, PrLM effectively learns from user responses without requiring annotated reasoning paths. Experiments on three personalized text generation datasets show that PrLM outperforms existing methods and remains robust across varying numbers of retrieved profiles and different retrievers.

Recently, the personalization of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate content that aligns with individual user preferences has garnered widespread attention. Personalized Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which retrieves relevant documents from the user's history to reflect their preferences and enhance LLM generation, is one commonly used approach for personalization. However, existing personalized RAG methods do not consider that the histories of similar users can also assist in personalized generation for the current user, meaning that collaborative information between users can also benefit personalized generation. Inspired by the application of collaborative filtering in recommender systems, we propose a method called CFRAG, which adapts Collaborative Filtering to RAG for personalized text generation. However, this presents two challenges: (1) how to incorporate collaborative information without explicit user similarity labels? (2) how to retrieve documents that support personalized LLM generation? For Challenge 1, we use contrastive learning to train user embeddings to retrieve similar users and introduce collaborative information. For Challenge 2, we design a personalized retriever and reranker to retrieve the top-k documents from these users' histories. We take into account the user's preference during retrieval and reranking. Then we leverage feedback from the LLM to fine-tune the personalized retriever and reranker, enabling them to retrieve documents that meet the personalized generation needs of the LLM. Experimental results on the Language Model Personalization (LaMP) benchmark validate the effectiveness of CFRAG. Further analysis confirms the importance of incorporating collaborative information.

In real-world recommender systems, user engagement and subjective feedback play pivotal roles in shaping the content distribution mechanism of the platform. When platforms reach a certain scale, they often gather valuable questionnaire feedback data from users to evaluate their satisfaction with recommended items. Compared to traditional user feedback such as likes, questionnaires explicitly capture both satisfaction and dissatisfaction and are unaffected by other users' questionnaires, thus better expressing users' true preferences. In this paper, we aim to leverage the questionnaire feedback to align the recommendation model with users' true preferences. However, due to the platform distribution mechanism and divergent user attitudes toward questionnaires, the questionnaire feedback data frequently becomes sparse and exhibits selection biases, resulting in challenges in feature integration and training process. To address these issues, we introduce a novel user Satisfaction Alignment framework that effectively leverages Questionnaire feedback to enhance Recommendation, named SAQRec. SAQRec begins by training an unbiased satisfaction model to impute satisfaction, addressing selection bias and data sparsity. Then, SAQRec aligns features with users' true preferences by disentangling satisfaction and dissatisfaction from click history and categorizing clicked items into multiple satisfaction levels through the imputed satisfactions. Additionally, the imputed satisfactions from the pre-trained unbiased satisfaction model serve as pseudo-labels to align the model's outputs with users' true preferences. Extensive experiments on both public and commercial datasets demonstrate SAQRec's superior integration of questionnaire feedback in recommendation models. Online A/B testing on a short video platform confirms its effectiveness in boosting user watch time and positive-to-negative feedback ratio, enhancing overall performance and user satisfaction.

Nowadays, many platforms provide users with both search and recommendation services as important tools for accessing information. The phenomenon has led to a correlation between user search and recommendation behaviors, providing an opportunity to model user interests in a fine-grained way. Existing approaches either model user search and recommendation behaviors separately or overlook the different transitions between user search and recommendation behaviors. In this paper, we propose a framework named UniSAR that effectively models the different types of fine-grained behavior transitions for providing users a Unified Search And Recommendation service. Specifically, UniSAR models the user transition behaviors between search and recommendation through three steps: extraction, alignment, and fusion, which are respectively implemented by transformers equipped with pre-defined masks, contrastive learning that aligns the extracted fine-grained user transitions, and cross-attentions that fuse different transitions. To provide users with a unified service, the learned representations are fed into the downstream search and recommendation models. Joint learning on both search and recommendation data is employed to utilize the knowledge and enhance each other. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of UniSAR in terms of enhancing both search and recommendation simultaneously. The experimental analysis further validates that UniSAR enhances the results by successfully modeling the user transition behaviors between search and recommendation.

Group-fair recommendation aims at ensuring the equality of recommendation results across user groups categorized by sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, occupation, etc.). Existing group-fair recommendation models traditionally employ original user embeddings for both training and testing, primarily focusing on statistical learning while imposing group fairness constraints under the I.I.D. assumption. However, these models encounter limitations when addressing out-of-distribution (OOD) sensitive attributes. The fundamental issue of unfairness within user embeddings arises from a causal perspective, where each embedding vector comprises an exogenous component devoid of correlations with sensitive attributes and an endogenous component strongly correlated with these attributes. Overlooking the distinction between these two components during model training renders models sensitive to shifts in the distribution of sensitive attributes. This paper introduces the concept of Counterfactual Group Fairness (CGF) along with a corresponding metric to evaluate group fairness in scenarios involving OOD sensitive attributes in recommender systems. Building on this foundation, we propose a model-agnostic causal embedding learning framework named MACE. MACE effectively disentangles user embedding vectors into their exogenous and endogenous parts, thus ensuring group fairness, even in the presence of OOD sensitive attributes in embeddings. Specifically, MACE identifies the exogenous part of each user's embedding using mutual information minimization, treating it as instrumental variables. Subsequently, under the constraint of CGF, MACE reconstructs the endogenous and exogenous parts using the instrumental variable regression, combines the obtained parts into novel user embeddings using deep neural networks, and uses the combined embeddings for fair recommendation. Experimental results demonstrated that MACE can outperform the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of the metric of CGF while maintaining a comparable recommendation accuracy.