We present a Proactive Monitoring Agent designed for large-scale customer data platforms, such as Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), to predict and prevent workflow disruptions before they impact business operations. Unlike existing reactive solutions that assist engineers only after failures occur, our agent anticipates potential failures across multiple workflow stages, explains its predictions in natural language, and interacts with customer support engineers through a conversational interface. The system integrates a machine learning-based Prediction Module, Knowledge Graph APIs for contextual data access, and a Query Processor that powers an interactive Q&A experience, enabling timely and actionable insights to minimize operational risks and maximize business continuity.

Scaling laws have enabled large language models(LLMs) to achieve remarkable performance and strong generalization across diverse language understanding tasks, including few-shot, in-context, and zero-shot learning. While prior studies in large-scale collaborative filtering(CF) have revealed clear relationships between model performance and scaling factors such as data size and model capacity, little attention has been given to how heterogeneous datasets can be synergistically combined for recommender systems(RS). In particular, it remains unclear whether systematically integrating diverse recommendation datasets can yield scaling behaviors analogous to those observed in LLMs, while simultaneously addressing challenges such as cold-start recommendation and cross-domain transfer. In this paper, we present RecCLIP, a multimodal framework that reformulates user--item interactions as visual representations compatible with vision--language models(VLMs). RecCLIP compresses interaction signals and employs prompt-based ranking to enable unified representation across heterogeneous data sources. Extensive experiments reveal consistent power-law scaling trends with respect to data size, and demonstrate that RecCLIP achieves superior performance in both cold-start and cross-domain transfer scenarios. Our findings underscore the importance of data-centric design in recommender systems and provide practical insights into scaling them effectively.The code for replication is available at https://github.com/jinliwei-1/RecCLIP.

Enabling large language models (LLMs) to effectively process and reason with graph-structured data remains a significant challenge despite their remarkable success in natural language tasks. Current approaches either convert graph structures into verbose textual descriptions, consuming substantial computational resources, or employ complex graph neural networks as tokenizers, which introduce significant training overhead. To bridge this gap, we present NT-LLM, a novel framework with an anchor-based positional encoding scheme for graph representation. Our approach strategically selects reference nodes as anchors and encodes each node's position relative to these anchors, capturing essential topological information without the computational burden of existing methods. Notably, we identify and address a fundamental issue: the inherent misalignment between discrete hop-based distances in graphs and continuous distances in embedding spaces. By implementing a rank-preserving objective for positional encoding pretraining, NT-LLM achieves superior performance across diverse graph tasks ranging from basic structural analysis to complex reasoning scenarios. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that this lightweight yet powerful approach effectively enhances LLMs' ability to understand and reason with graph-structured information, offering an efficient solution for graph-based applications of language models.

Although large language models (LLMs) trained on extensive multilingual corpora exhibit impressive language transfer, they often fail to respond in the user’s desired language due to corpus imbalances, an embarrassingly simple problem known as the language confusion. However, existing solutions like in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) have drawbacks: in-context learning consumes context window space, diminishing attention as text lengthens, while SFT requires extensive, labor-intensive data collection. To overcome these limitations, we propose the language-sensitive intervention (LSI), a novel, lightweight, and label-free approach. Specifically, we analyze language confusion from a causal perspective, revealing that the training corpus’s language distribution acts as a confounder, disadvantaging languages that are underrepresented in the dataset. Then, we identify a language-sensitive dimension in the LLM’s residual stream, i.e., the language vector, which allows us to estimate the average causal effect of prompts on this dimension. During inference, we directly intervene on the language vector to generate responses in the desired language.To further advance research on this issue, we introduce a new benchmark that detects language confusion and assesses content quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates language confusion without additional complex mechanisms. Our code is available at https://github.com/SoseloX/LSI.

Generative models, particularly diffusion model, have emerged as powerful tools for sequential recommendation. However, accurately modeling user preferences remains challenging due to the noise perturbations inherent in the forward and reverse processes of diffusion-based methods. Towards this end, this study introduces FMRec, a Flow Matching based model that employs a straight flow trajectory and a modified loss tailored for the recommendation task. Additionally, from the diffusion-model perspective, we integrate a reconstruction loss to improve robustness against noise perturbations, thereby retaining user preferences during the forward process. In the reverse process, we employ a deterministic reverse sampler, specifically an ODE-based updating function, to eliminate unnecessary randomness, thereby ensuring that the generated recommendations closely align with user needs. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets reveal that FMRec achieves an average improvement of 6.53% over state-of-the-art methods. The replication code is available at https://github.com/FengLiu-1/FMRec.

Multi-modal recommender systems (MMRS) have gained significant attention due to their ability to leverage information from various modalities to enhance recommendation quality. However, existing negative sampling techniques often struggle to effectively utilize the multi-modal data, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we identify two key challenges in negative sampling for MMRS: (1) producing cohesive negative samples contrasting with positive samples and (2) maintaining a balanced influence across different modalities. To address these challenges, we propose NegGen, a novel framework that utilizes multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to generate balanced and contrastive negative samples. We design three different prompt templates to enable NegGen to analyze and manipulate item attributes across multiple modalities, and then generate negative samples that introduce better supervision signals and ensure modality balance. Furthermore, NegGen employs a causal learning module to disentangle the effect of intervened key features and irrelevant item attributes, enabling fine-grained learning of user preferences. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of NegGen compared to state-of-the-art methods in both negative sampling and multi-modal recommendation.

Graph-based recommender systems have achieved remarkable effectiveness by modeling high-order interactions between users and items. However, such approaches are significantly undermined by popularity bias, which distorts the interaction graph’s structure—referred to as topology bias. This leads to overrepresentation of popular items, thereby reinforcing biases and fairness issues through the user-system feedback loop. Despite attempts to study this effect, most prior work focuses on the embedding or gradient level bias, overlooking how topology bias fundamentally distorts the message passing process itself. We bridge this gap by providing an empirical and theoretical analysis from a Dirichlet energy perspective, revealing that graph message passing inherently amplifies topology bias and consistently benefits highly connected nodes. To address these limitations, we propose Test-time Simplicial Propagation (TSP), which extends message passing to higher-order simplicial complexes. By incorporating richer structures beyond pairwise connections, TSP mitigates harmful topology bias and substantially improves the representation and recommendation of long-tail items during inference. Extensive experiments across five real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach in mitigating topology bias and enhancing recommendation quality. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/sotaagi/TSP.

The logs of the use of a search engine provide sufficient data to train a better ranker. However, it is well known that such implicit feedback reflects biases, and in particular a presentation bias that favors higher-ranked results. Unbiased Learning-to-Rank (ULTR) methods attempt to optimize performance by jointly modeling this bias along with the ranker so that the bias can be removed. Such methods have been shown to provide theoretical soundness, and promise superior performance and low deployment costs. However, existing ULTR methods don't recognize that query-document relevance is a confounder -- it affects both the likelihood of a result being clicked because of relevance and the likelihood of the result being ranked high by the base ranker. Moreover, the performance guarantees of existing ULTR methods assume the use of a weak ranker -- one that does a poor job of ranking documents based on relevance to a query. In practice, of course, commercial search engines use highly tuned rankers, and desire to improve upon them using the implicit judgments in search logs. This results in a significant correlation between position and relevance, which leads existing ULTR methods to overestimate click propensities in highly ranked results, reducing ULTR's effectiveness. This paper is the first to demonstrate the problem of propensity overestimation by ULTR algorithms, based on a causal analysis. We develop a new learning objective based on a backdoor adjustment. In addition, we introduce the Logging-Policy-aware Propensity (LPP) model that can jointly learn LPP and a more accurate ranker. We extensively test our approach on two public benchmark tasks and show that our proposal is effective, practical and significantly outperforms the state of the art.

Unbiased Learning to Rank(ULTR), i.e., learning to rank documents with biased user feedback data, is a well-known challenge in information retrieval. Existing methods in unbiased learning to rank typically rely on click modeling or inverse propensity weighting(IPW). Unfortunately, search engines face the issue of a severe long-tail query distribution, which neither click modeling nor IPW handles well. Click modeling usually requires that the same query-document pair appears multiple times for reliable inference, which makes it fall short for tail queries; IPW suffers from high variance since it is highly sensitive to small propensity score values. Therefore, a general debiasing framework that works well under tail queries is sorely needed. To address this problem, we propose a model-based unbiased learning-to-rank framework. Specifically, we develop a general context-aware user simulator to generate pseudo clicks for unobserved ranked lists to train rankers, which addresses the data sparsity problem. In addition, considering the discrepancy between pseudo clicks and actual clicks, we take the observation of a ranked list as the treatment variable and further incorporate inverse propensity weighting with pseudo labels in a doubly robust way. The derived bias and variance indicate that the proposed model-based method is more robust than existing methods. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including simulated datasets and real click logs, demonstrate that the proposed model-based method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/rowedenny/MULTR.