Personalized search ranking systems are critical for driving engagement and revenue in modern e-commerce platforms. Existing methods primarily model users' broad interests from historical behaviors but often fail to explicitly align these with real-time intent expressed in user queries. In this paper, we propose DiffusionGS, a scalable generative framework that treats user queries as explicit intent anchors to extract user interests from long-term, noisy behavior histories. Specifically, we formulate interest extraction as a conditional denoising task, where the user's query guides a conditional diffusion process to produce a robust, user intent-aware representation from their behavioral sequence. A User-aware Denoising Layer (UDL) further refines attention distribution using user-specific profiles. By reframing queries as intent priors and leveraging diffusion-based denoising, our method provides a powerful mechanism for capturing dynamic user interest shifts. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate the superiority of DiffusionGS over state-of-the-art methods. © 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

Recent advancements in Generative AI, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have demonstrated remarkable success across various general tasks. Extensive studies have explored leveraging generative models in finance, but significant challenges persist. This half-day workshop explores potential approaches and research directions to address these challenges by equipping generative models with advanced Information Retrieval (IR) models. Specifically, this workshop seeks to provide a platform for discussing innovative ideas that facilitate the advancement of IR technology to enrich generative models in finance from four key perspectives: (i) financial IR techniques (ii) financial IR benchmarking and evaluation (iii) financial systems and agents/assistants (iv) and trustworthiness, privacy and security when applying financial IR and generative models. This workshop aims to deepen understanding, accelerate progress, and support the advancement of IR technology to enhance generative models to address financial challenges.

Understanding user intent is essential for various retrieval tasks. By leveraging contextual information within sessions, e.g., query history and user click behaviors, search systems can capture user intent more accurately and thus perform better. However, most existing systems only consider intra-session contexts and may suffer from the problem of lacking contextual information, because short search sessions account for a large proportion in practical scenarios. We believe that in these scenarios, considering more contexts, e.g., cross-session dependencies, may help alleviate the problem and contribute to better performance. Therefore, we propose a novel Hybrid framework for Session Context Modeling (HSCM), which realizes session-level multi-task learning based on the self-attention mechanism. To alleviate the problem of lacking contextual information within current sessions, HSCM exploits the cross-session contexts by sampling user interactions under similar search intents in the historical sessions and further aggregating them into the local contexts. Besides, application of the self-attention mechanism rather than RNN-based frameworks in modeling session-level sequences also helps (1) better capture interactions within sessions, (2) represent the session contexts in parallelization. Experimental results on two practical search datasets show that HSCM not only outperforms strong baseline solutions such as HiNT, CARS, and BERTserini in document ranking, but also performs significantly better than most existing query suggestion methods. According to the results in an additional experiment, we have also found that HSCM is superior to most ranking models in click prediction.

Retrieval models aim to estimate the relevance of a document to a certain query. Although existing retrieval models have gained much success in both deepening our understanding of information seeking behavior and constructing practical retrieval systems (e.g. Web search engines), we have to admit that the models work in a rather different manner than how humans make relevance judgments. In this paper, we aim to reexamine the existing models as well as to propose new ones based on the findings in how human read documents during relevance judgment. First, we summarize a number of reading heuristics from practical user behavior patterns, which are categorized into implicit and explicit heuristics. By reviewing a variety of existing retrieval models, we find that most of them only satisfy a part of these reading heuristics. To evaluate the effectiveness of each heuristic, we conduct an ablation study and find that most heuristics have positive impacts on retrieval performance. We further integrate all the effective heuristics into a new retrieval model named Reading Inspired Model (RIM). Specifically, implicit reading heuristics are incorporated into the model framework and explicit reading heuristics are modeled as a Markov Decision Process and learned by reinforcement learning. Experimental results on a large-scale public available benchmark dataset and two test sets from NTCIR WWW tasks show that RIM outperforms most existing models, which illustrates the effectiveness of the reading heuristics. We believe that this work contributes to constructing retrieval models with both higher retrieval performance and better explainability.

Click-through information is considered as a valuable source of users’ implicit relevance feedback for commercial search engines. As existing studies have shown that the search result position in a search engine result page (SERP) has a very strong influence on users’ examination behavior, most existing click models are position based, assuming that users examine results from top to bottom in a linear fashion. Although these click models have been successful, most do not take temporal information into account. As many existing studies have shown, click dwell time and click sequence information are strongly correlated with users’ perceived relevance and search satisfaction. Incorporating temporal information may be important to improve performance of user click models for Web searches. In this article, we investigate the problem of properly incorporating temporal information into click models. We first carry out a laboratory eye-tracking study to analyze users’ examination behavior in different click sequences and find that the user common examination path among adjacent clicks is linear. Next, we analyze the user dwell time distribution in different search logs and find that we cannot simply use a click dwell time threshold (e.g., 30 seconds) to distinguish relevant/irrelevant results. Finally, we propose a novel time-aware click model (TACM), which captures the temporal information of user behavior. We compare the TACM to several existing click models using two real-world search engine logs. Experimental results show that the TACM outperforms other click models in terms of both predicting click behavior (perplexity) and estimating result relevance (NDCG).

Predicting users' examination of search results is one of the key concerns in Web search related studies. With more and more heterogeneous components federated into search engine result pages (SERPs), it becomes difficult for traditional position-based models to accurately predict users' actual examination patterns. Therefore, a number of prior works investigate the connection between examination and users' explicit interaction behaviors (e.g.~click-through, mouse movement). Although these works gain much success in predicting users' examination behavior on SERPs, they require the collection of large scale user behavior data, which makes it impossible to predict examination behavior on newly-generated SERPs. To predict user examination on SERPs containing heterogenous components without user interaction information, we propose a new prediction model based on visual saliency map and page content features. Visual saliency, which is designed to measure the likelihood of a given area to attract human visual attention, is used to predict users' attention distribution on heterogenous search components. With an experimental search engine, we carefully design a user study in which users' examination behavior (eye movement) is recorded. Examination prediction results based on this collected data set demonstrate that visual saliency features significantly improve the performance of examination model in heterogeneous search environments. We also found that saliency features help predict internal examination behavior within vertical results.

Click-through information is considered as a valuable source of users' implicit relevance feedback. As user behavior is usually influenced by a number of factors such as position, presentation style and site reputation, researchers have proposed a variety of assumptions (i.e.~click models) to generate a reasonable estimation of result relevance. The construction of click models usually follow some hypotheses. For example, most existing click models follow the sequential examination hypothesis in which users examine results from top to bottom in a linear fashion. While these click models have been successful, many recent studies showed that there is a large proportion of non-sequential browsing (both examination and click) behaviors in Web search, which the previous models fail to cope with. In this paper, we investigate the problem of properly incorporating non-sequential behavior into click models. We firstly carry out a laboratory eye-tracking study to analyze user's non-sequential examination behavior and then propose a novel click model named Partially Sequential Click Model (PSCM) that captures the practical behavior of users. We compare PSCM with a number of existing click models using two real-world search engine logs. Experimental results show that PSCM outperforms other click models in terms of both predicting click behavior (perplexity) and estimating result relevance (NDCG and user preference test). We also publicize the implementations of PSCM and related datasets for possible future comparison studies.

User's examination of search results is a key concept involved in all the click models. However, most studies assumed that eye fixation means examination and no further study has been carried out to better understand user's examination behavior. In this study, we design an experimental search engine to collect both the user's feedback on their examinations and the eye-tracking/click-through data. To our surprise, a large proportion (45.8%) of the results fixated by users are not recognized as being "read". Looking into the tracking data, we found that before the user actually "reads" the result, there is often a "skimming" step in which the user quickly looks at the result without reading it. We thus propose a two-stage examination model which composes of a first "from skimming to reading" stage (Stage 1) and a second "from reading to clicking" stage (Stage 2). We found that the biases (e.g. position bias, domain bias, attractiveness bias) considered in many studies impact in different ways in Stage 1 and Stage 2, which suggests that users make judgments according to different signals in different stages. We also show that the two-stage examination behaviors can be predicted with mouse movement behavior, which can be collected at large scale. Relevance estimation with the two-stage examination model also outperforms that with a single-stage examination model. This study shows that the user's examination of search results is a complex cognitive process that needs to be investigated in greater depth and this may have a significant impact on Web search.

In modern search engines, an increasing number of search result pages (SERPs) are federated from multiple specialized search engines (called verticals, such as Image or Video). As an effective approach to interpret users' click-through behavior as feedback information, most click models were designed to reduce the position bias and improve ranking performance of ordinary search results, which have homogeneous appearances. However, when vertical results are combined with ordinary ones, significant differences in presentation may lead to user behavior biases and thus failure of state-of-the-art click models. With the help of a popular commercial search engine in China, we collected a large scale log data set which contains behavior information on both vertical and ordinary results. We also performed eye-tracking analysis to study user's real-world examining behavior. According these analysis, we found that different result appearances may cause different behavior biases both for vertical results (local effect) and for the whole result lists (global effect). These biases include: examine bias for vertical results (especially those with multimedia components), trust bias for result lists with vertical results, and a higher probability of result revisitation for vertical results. Based on these findings, a novel click model considering these biases besides position bias was constructed to describe interaction with SERPs containing verticals. Experimental results show that the new Vertical-aware Click Model (VCM) is better at interpreting user click behavior on federated searches in terms of both log-likelihood and perplexity than existing models.