Multimodal recommendation improves user modeling by integrating collaborative signals with heterogeneous item content. In real applications, user interests evolve over time and exhibit nonstationary dynamics, where different preference factors change at different rates. This challenge is amplified in multimodal settings because visual and textual cues can dominate decisions under different temporal regimes. Despite strong progress, most multimodal recommenders still rely on static interaction graphs or coarse temporal heuristics, which limits their ability to model continuous preference evolution with fine-grained temporal adaptation. To address these limitations, we propose TimeMM, a time-conditioned spectral filtering framework for dynamic multimodal recommendation. TimeMM instantiates Time-as-Operator by mapping interaction recency to a family of parametric temporal kernels that reweight edges on the user--item graph, producing component-specific representations without explicit eigendecomposition. To capture non-stationary interests, we introduce Adaptive Spectral Filtering that mixes the operator bank according to temporal context, yielding prediction-specific effective spectral responses. To account for modality-specific temporal sensitivity, we further propose Spectral-Aware Modality Routing that calibrates visual and textual contributions conditioned on the same temporal context. Finally, a ranking-space Spectral Diversity Regularization encourages complementary expert behaviors and prevents filter-bank collapse. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that TimeMM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal recommenders while maintaining linear-time scalability.

User simulators can rapidly generate a large volume of timely user behavior data, providing a testing platform for reinforcement learning-based recommender systems, thus accelerating their iteration and optimization. However, prevalent user simulators generally suffer from significant limitations, including the opacity of user preference modeling and the incapability of evaluating simulation accuracy. In this paper, we introduce an LLM-powered user simulator to simulate user engagement with items in an explicit manner, thereby enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of reinforcement learning-based recommender systems training. Specifically, we identify the explicit logic of user preferences, leverage LLMs to analyze item characteristics and distill user sentiments, and design a logical model to imitate real human engagement. By integrating a statistical model, we further enhance the reliability of the simulation, proposing an ensemble model that synergizes logical and statistical insights for user interaction simulations. Capitalizing on the extensive knowledge and semantic generation capabilities of LLMs, our user simulator faithfully emulates user behaviors and preferences, yielding high-fidelity training data that enrich the training of recommendation algorithms. We establish quantifying and qualifying experiments on five datasets to validate the simulator's effectiveness and stability across various recommendation scenarios.

Multimodal recommendation aims to enhance user preference modeling by leveraging rich item content such as images and text. Yet dominant systems fuse modalities in the spatial domain, obscuring the frequency structure of signals and amplifying misalignment and redundancy. We adopt a spectral information-theoretic view and show that, under an orthogonal transform that approximately block-diagonalizes bandwise covariances, the Gaussian Information Bottleneck objective decouples across frequency bands, providing a principled basis for separate-then-fuse paradigm. Building on this foundation, we propose FITMM, a Frequency-aware Information-Theoretic framework for multimodal recommendation. FITMM constructs graph-enhanced item representations, performs modality-wise spectral decomposition to obtain orthogonal bands, and forms lightweight within-band multimodal components. A residual, task-adaptive gate aggregates bands into the final representation. To control redundancy and improve generalization, we regularize training with a frequency-domain IB term that allocates capacity across bands (Wiener-like shrinkage with shut-off of weak bands). We further introduce a cross-modal spectral consistency loss that aligns modalities within each band. The model is jointly optimized with the standard recommendation loss. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that FITMM consistently and significantly outperforms advanced baselines.

Multimodal recommendation aims to integrate collaborative signals with heterogeneous content such as visual and textual information, but remains challenged by modality-specific noise, semantic inconsistency, and unstable propagation over user–item graphs. These issues are often exacerbated by naive fusion or shallow modeling strategies, leading to degraded generalization and poor robustness. While recent work has explored the frequency domain as a lens to separate stable from noisy signals, most methods rely on static filtering or reweighting, lacking the ability to reason over spectral structure or adapt to modality-specific reliability. To address these challenges, we propose a Structured Spectral Reasoning (SSR) framework for frequency-aware multimodal recommendation. Our method follows a four-stage pipeline: (i) Decompose graph-based multimodal signals into spectral bands via graph-guided transformations to isolate semantic granularity; (ii) Modulate band-level reliability with spectral band masking, a training-time masking with representation-consistency objective that suppresses brittle frequency components; (iii) Fuse complementary frequency cues using hyperspectral reasoning with low-rank cross-band interaction; and (iv) Align modality-specific spectral features via contrastive regularization to promote semantic and structural consistency. Experiments on three real-world benchmarks show consistent gains over strong baselines, particularly under sparse and cold-start settings. Additional analyses indicate that structured spectral modeling improves robustness and provides clearer diagnostics of how different bands contribute to performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention in Recommendation Systems (RS) due to their extensive world knowledge and robust reasoning capabilities. However, a critical challenge lies in enabling LLMs to effectively comprehend and extract insights from massive user behaviors. Current approaches that directly leverage LLMs for user interest learning face limitations in handling long sequential behaviors, effectively extracting interest, and applying interest in practical scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a Hierarchical Tree Search-based User Lifelong Behavior Modeling framework (HiT-LBM). HiT-LBM integrates Chunked User Behavior Extraction (CUBE) and Hierarchical Tree Search for Interest (HTS) to capture diverse interests and interest evolution of user. CUBE divides user lifelong behaviors into multiple chunks and learns the interest and interest evolution within each chunk in a cascading manner. HTS generates candidate interests through hierarchical expansion and searches for the optimal interest with process rating model to ensure information gain for each behavior chunk. Additionally, we design Temporal-Ware Interest Fusion (TIF) to integrate interests from multiple behavior chunks, constructing a comprehensive representation of user lifelong interests. The representation can be embedded into any recommendation model to enhance performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing that it surpasses state-of-the-art methods. We also deploy HiT-LBM on Kuaishou's online advertising platform, showing 3.5% increase of revenue. We release the implementation code https://github.com/xiayu-cell/HiT-LBM.