Simulating group-level user behavior enables scalable counterfactual evaluation of merchant strategies without costly online experiments. However, building a trustworthy simulator faces two structural challenges. First, information incompleteness causes reasoning-based simulators to over-rationalize when unobserved factors such as offline context and implicit habits are missing. Second, mechanism duality requires capturing both interpretable preferences and implicit statistical regularities, which no single paradigm achieves alone. We propose Policy-Guided Hybrid Simulation (PGHS), a dual-process framework that mines transferable decision policies from behavioral trajectories and uses them as a shared alignment layer. This layer anchors an LLM-based reasoning branch that prevents over-rationalization and an ML-based fitting branch that absorbs implicit regularities. Group-level predictions from both branches are fused for complementary correction. We deploy PGHS on Meituan with 101 merchants and over 26,000 trajectories. PGHS achieves a group simulation error of 8.80%, improving over the best reasoning-based and fitting-based baselines by 45.8% and 40.9% respectively.

Practical Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) needs not only to recognize and extract the document contents, but also reason on them for answering questions. However, previous DocVQA data mainly focuses on in-line questions, where the answers could be directly extracted after locating keywords in the documents, which needs less reasoning. This paper therefore builds a large-scale dataset named Region-based Document VQA (RDVQA), which includes more practical questions for DocVQA. We then propose a novel Reason-over-In-region-Question-answering (ReIQ) model for addressing the problems. It is a pre-training-based model, where a Spatial-Token Pre-trained Model (STPM) is employed as the backbone. Two novel pre-training tasks, Masked Text Box Regression and Shuffled Triplet Reconstruction, are proposed to learn the entailment relationship between text blocks and tokens as well as contextual information, respectively. Moreover, a DocVQA State Tracking Module (DocST) is also proposed to track the DocVQA state in the fine-tuning stage. Experimental results show that our model improves the performance onRDVQA significantly, although more work should be done for practical DocVQA as shown inRDVQA.

Relevance is a fundamental concept in information retrieval (IR) studies. It is however often observed that relevance as annotated by secondary assessors may not necessarily mean usefulness and satisfaction perceived by users. In this study, we confirm the difference by a laboratory study in which we collect relevance annotations by external assessors, usefulness and user satisfaction information by users, for a set of search tasks. We also find that a measure based on usefulness rather than relevance annotated has a better correlation with user satisfaction. However, we show that external assessors are capable of annotating usefulness when provided with more search context information. In addition, we also show that it is possible to generate automatically usefulness labels when some training data is available. Our findings explain why traditional system-centric evaluation metrics are not well aligned with user satisfaction and suggest that a usefulness-based evaluation method can be defined to better reflect the quality of search systems perceived by the users.

Sentiment extraction aims to extract and group the task of extracting and grouping aspect and opinion words from online reviews. Previous works usually extract aspect and opinion words by leveraging association between a single pair of aspect and opinion word[5] [14] [9] [4][11], but the structure of aspect and opinion word clusters has not been fully exploited.

Satisfaction prediction is one of the prime concerns in search performance evaluation. It is a non-trivial task for two major reasons: (1) The definition of satisfaction is rather subjective and different users may have different opinions in satisfaction judgement. (2) Most existing studies on satisfaction prediction mainly rely on users' click-through or query reformulation behaviors but there are many sessions without such kind of interactions. To shed light on these research questions, we construct an experimental search engine that could collect users' satisfaction feedback as well as mouse click-through/movement data. Different from existing studies, we compare for the first time search users' and external assessors' opinions on satisfaction. We find that search users pay more attention to the utility of results while external assessors emphasize on the efforts spent in search sessions. Inspired by recent studies in predicting result relevance based on mouse movement patterns (namely motifs), we propose to estimate the utilities of search results and the efforts in search sessions with motifs extracted from mouse movement data on search result pages (SERPs). Besides the existing frequency-based motif selection method, two novel selection strategies (distance-based and distribution-based) are also adopted to extract high quality motifs for satisfaction prediction. Experimental results on over 1,000 user sessions show that the proposed strategies outperform existing methods and also have promising generalization capability for different users and queries.