As users' preferences evolve over time, personalized online services increasingly rely on sequential recommender systems to predict future interactions by modeling patterns in historical user behavior. However, existing methods for sequential recommendation (SR) face two key challenges: they struggle to simultaneously leverage collaborative, semantic, and rating information, and the use of hard labels during training provides limited supervision. In this paper, we introduce SEAR, an LLM-powered Sequential recommEndation framework via fusion of collAborative, semantic, and Rating information. The proposed deep model comprises an embedding layer and a sequence encoder. The embedding layer transforms user-item interactions into three types of embeddings: collaborative, semantic, and rating. The sequence encoder then integrates these embeddings and identifies sequential patterns to model user representations. To enhance the utilization of item semantics, we integrate a large language model (LLM) to extract LLM embeddings. These embeddings are then employed to initialize the semantic embedding layer, collaborative embedding layer, and item embeddings. To capture more nuanced user behavior patterns, we generate preference-weighted soft labels based on the next k interactions. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of SEAR, and ablation studies further highlight the distinct contributions of the collaborative, semantic, and rating information.

The pursuit of personalized outfit recommendation, tailored to individual user preferences, has emerged as a central focus in research. Despite the propositions of various outfit recommendation methods, the modeling of fashion styles within outfits, a pivotal criterion for user selection, has been largely overlooked. Fashion styles are intricately embedded in multi-modal information, such as images and text. Unfortunately, current outfit recommendation methods predominantly focus on a single modality or employ simplistic fusion techniques, thus failing to capture the intricate interplay between different fashion data modalities, resulting in an inability to model fashion styles effectively. In this work, we devise a novel Personalized Outfit Recommender with Style-Guided Multi-Modal Feature Fusion scheme, denoted as POSM, aiming to maximize the utilization of multi-modal features in outfit recommendation. In particular, this scheme consists of three key components: modality-aware outfit modeling, feature separation network, and style mapping component. Extensive experiments conducted on the benchmark datasets validate the superiority of POSM over state-of-the-art methods.

As AI evolves, collaboration among heterogeneous models helps overcome data scarcity by enabling knowledge transfer across institutions and devices.Traditional Federated Learning (FL) only supports homogeneous models, limiting collaboration among clients with heterogeneous model architectures.To address this, Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HtFL) methods are developed to enable collaboration across diverse heterogeneous models while tackling the data heterogeneity issue at the same time.However, a comprehensive benchmark for standardized evaluation and analysis of the rapidly growing HtFL methods is lacking.Firstly, the highly varied datasets, model heterogeneity scenarios, and different method implementations become hurdles to making easy and fair comparisons among HtFL methods.Secondly, the effectiveness and robustness of HtFL methods are under-explored in various scenarios, such as the medical domain and sensor signal modality.To fill this gap, we introduce the first Heterogeneous Federated Learning Library (HtFLlib), an easy-to-use and extensible framework that integrates multiple datasets and model heterogeneity scenarios, offering a robust benchmark for research and practical applications.Specifically, HtFLlib integrates (1) 12 datasets spanning various domains, modalities, and data heterogeneity scenarios; (2) 40 model architectures, ranging from small to large, across three modalities;(3) a modularized and easy-to-extend HtFL codebase with implementations of 10 representative HtFL methods; and (4) systematic evaluations in terms of accuracy, convergence, computation costs, and communication costs.We emphasize the advantages and potential of state-of-the-art HtFL methods and hope that HtFLlib will catalyze advancing HtFL research and enable its broader applications.The code is released at https://github.com/TsingZ0/HtFLlib.

The recent years have witnessed a surge in the development of traffic flow prediction methods, often deployed on cloud platforms to offer predictive services for entire transportation networks. However, the processes of training and executing a model for the entire traffic network are both time-consuming and computationally expensive. As a result, the utilization of edge servers for local sub-network prediction services has gained prominence. Nevertheless, training prediction models for numerous sub-networks within the extensive traffic network remains a time-intensive and computing resource-consuming task. To tackle this challenge, this article introduces the Pre-trained model REcommendation Framework for Edge computing enabled tRaffic flow prediction (PREFER). PREFER trains a set of traffic flow prediction models on selected sub-networks, then recommends optimal pre-trained models for edge servers. The recommendation is specifically based on performance prediction, integrating neural collaborative filtering and traffic flow characteristics. Experiments conducted on real datasets reveal that the pre-trained models recommended by PREFER perform close to the actual optimal ones and significantly outperform existing recommendation algorithms.

With the explosive growth of online information, recommendation systems have become essential tools for alleviating information overload. In recent years, researchers have increasingly focused on centralized recommendation systems, capitalizing on the powerful computing capabilities of cloud servers and the rich historical data they store. However, the rapid development of edge computing and mobile devices in recent years has provided new alternatives for building recommendation systems. These alternatives offer advantages such as privacy protection and low-latency recommendations. To leverage the advantages of different computing nodes, including cloud servers, edge servers, and terminal devices, researchers have proposed recommendation systems that involve the collaboration of these nodes, known as distributed recommendation systems. This survey provides a systematic review of distributed recommendation systems. Specifically, we design a taxonomy for these systems from four perspectives and comprehensively summarize each study by category. In particular, we conduct a detailed analysis of the collaboration mechanisms of distributed recommendation systems. Finally, we discuss potential future research directions in this field.