With the rapid growth of Web-based academic publications, more and more papers are being published annually, making it increasingly difficult to find relevant prior work. Citation prediction aims to automatically suggest appropriate references, helping scholars navigate the expanding scientific literature. Here we present CiteRAG, the first comprehensive retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-integrated benchmark for evaluating large language models on academic citation prediction, featuring a multi-level retrieval strategy, specialized retrievers, and generators. Our benchmark makes four core contributions: (1) We establish two instances of the citation prediction task with different granularity. Task 1 focuses on coarse-grained list-specific citation prediction, while Task 2 targets fine-grained position-specific citation prediction. To enhance these two tasks, we build a dataset containing 7,267 instances for Task 1 and 8,541 instances for Task 2, enabling comprehensive evaluation of both retrieval and generation. (2) We construct a three-level large-scale corpus with 554k papers spanning many major subfields, using an incremental pipeline. (3) We propose a multi-level hybrid RAG approach to citation prediction, fine-tuning embedding models with contrastive learning to capture complex citation relationships, paired with specialized generation models. (4) We conduct extensive experiments across state-of-the-art language models, including closed-source APIs, open-source models, and our fine-tuned generators, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework. Our open-source toolkit enables reproducible evaluation and focuses on academic literature, providing the first comprehensive evaluation framework for citation prediction and serving as a methodological template for other scientific domains. Our source code and data are released at https://github.com/LQgdwind/CiteRAG.

Recent advances in graph contrastive learning (GCL) have significantly enhanced recommendation systems. However, most existing approaches predominantly focus on optimizing training data fit while overlooking exposure bias, a critical issue that can substantially impact recommendation effectiveness. Drawing inspiration from sociological theories of human interaction patterns-specifically how individuals balance self-presentation and self-hiding behaviors in social contexts-this paper proposes BPH4Rec, a novel Balancing self-Presentation and self-Hiding approach for exposure-aware Recommendation based on GCL. Within the GCL framework, BPH4Rec introduces two complementary mechanisms: (1) a self-hiding mechanism that modifies the adjacency matrix of contrastive views through custom inverse propensity scoring (IPS), effectively addressing exposure bias, and (2) a self-presentation mechanism that incorporates densification factors during matrix reconstruction to mitigate sparsity-induced biases. Through extensive evaluation on six public benchmark datasets, BPH4Rec demonstrates substantial improvements over state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in promoting long-tail item discovery while maintaining recommendation accuracy.

Procedural Language extensions of SQL (abbr. PL/SQL) enhance database programming by integrating procedural constructs with SQL's declarative syntax, thereby improving the reusability, modularity, and maintainability of SQL. Besides, PL/SQL in database systems presents significant challenges in real-world development, primarily due to the inherent complexity of programming. To reduce the development difficulty of PL/SQL, this paper studies the novel task of translating natural language (NL) to PL/SQL (i.e., NL-to-PL/SQL), aimed at simplifying PL/SQL development. Recent advancements in language models have shown promise in translating natural language questions into SQL queries (i.e., Text-to-SQL). However, the state-of-the-art Text-to-SQL methods focus only on single SQL queries, neglecting the procedural extensions of SQL, which limits their effectiveness for the NL-to-PL/SQL task. In this paper, we propose PLForge, a suite of pre-trained language models with parameter configurations of 3B, 7B, and 15B, tailored for NL-to-PL/SQL tasks. To enhance the PL/SQL generation capabilities of PLForge, we leverage a curated PL/SQL-centric data corpus and employ an incremental pre-training approach. Furthermore, to fully exploit the potential of PLForge, we propose a comprehensive prompt construction strategy tailored specifically for PL/SQL. Given the scarcity of NL-to-PL/SQL datasets, we develop a template-based method for generating NL-to-PL/SQL data. We conduct a series of experiments on PLForge and several baseline models. Based on execution match and exact match metrics that are designed specifically for the NL-to-PL/SQL task, the experimental results demonstrate that PLForge outperforms existing models in both in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning settings.