Motivated by the remarkable progress of large language models (LLMs) in objective tasks like mathematics and coding, there is growing interest in their potential to simulate human behavior—a capability with profound implications for transforming social science research and customer-centric business insights. However, LLMs often lack a nuanced understanding of human cognition and behavior, limiting their effectiveness in social simulation and personalized applications. We posit that this limitation stems from a fundamental misalignment: standard LLM pretraining on vast, uncontextualized web data does not capture the continuous, situated context of an individual's decisions, thoughts, and behaviors over time. To bridge this gap, we introduce HumanLLM, a foundation model designed for personalized understanding and simulation of individuals. We first construct the Cognitive Genome Dataset, a large-scale corpus curated from real-world user data on platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Blogger, and Amazon. Through a rigorous, multi-stage pipeline involving data filtering, synthesis, and quality control, we automatically extract over 5.5 million user logs to distill rich profiles, behaviors, and thinking patterns. We then formulate diverse learning tasks and perform supervised fine-tuning to empower the model to predict a wide range of individualized human behaviors, thoughts, and experiences. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that HumanLLM achieves superior performance in predicting user actions and inner thoughts, more accurately mimics user writing styles and preferences, and generates more authentic user profiles compared to base models. Furthermore, HumanLLM shows significant gains on out-of-domain social intelligence benchmarks, indicating enhanced generalization. This work paves the way for more human-centric AI systems by advancing research in social simulation, developing personalized companions, enabling marketing intelligence through simulated customer feedback, and powering more realistic user simulation for recommender systems.

Recommender systems suffer from biases that cause the collected feedback to incompletely reveal user preference. While debiasing learning has been extensively studied, they mostly focused on the specialized (calledcounterfactual) test environment simulated by random exposure of items, significantly degrading accuracy in the typical (calledfactual) test environment based on actual user-item interactions. In fact, each test environment highlights the benefit of a different aspect: the counterfactual test emphasizes user satisfaction in the long-terms, while the factual test focuses on predicting subsequent user behaviors on platforms. Therefore, it is desirable to have a model that performs well on both tests rather than only one. In this work, we introduce a new learning framework, calledBias-adaptivePreference distillationLearning (BPL), to gradually uncover user preferences with dual distillation strategies. These distillation strategies are designed to drive high performance in both factual and counterfactual test environments. Employing a specialized form ofteacher-student distillationfrom a biased model, BPL retains accurate preference knowledge aligned with the collected feedback, leading to high performance in the factual test. Furthermore, through self-distillation with reliability filtering, BPL iteratively refines its knowledge throughout the training process. This enables the model to produce more accurate predictions across a broader range of user-item combinations, thereby improving performance in the counterfactual test. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of BPL in both factual and counterfactual tests.

Collaborative Filtering (CF) remains the cornerstone of modern recommender systems, with dense embedding-based methods dominating current practice. However, these approaches suffer from a critical limitation: our theoretical analysis reveals a fundamental Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) ceiling when modeling unpopular items, where parameter-based dense models experience diminishing SNR under severe data sparsity. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose Sparse and Dense (SaD) , a unified framework that integrates the semantic expressiveness of dense embeddings with the structural reliability of sparse interaction patterns. We theoretically show that aligning these dual views yields a strictly superior global SNR. Concretely, SaD introduces a lightweight bidirectional alignment mechanism: the dense view enriches the sparse view by injecting semantic correlations, while the sparse view regularizes the dense model through explicit structural signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under this dual-view alignment, even a simple matrix factorization–style dense model can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, SaD is plug-and-play and can be seamlessly applied to a wide range of existing recommender models, highlighting the enduring power of CF when leveraged from dual perspectives. Further evaluations on real-world benchmarks show that SaD consistently outperforms strong baselines, ranking first on the BarsMatch leaderboard ( https://openbenchmark.github.io/BARS/Matching/leaderboard/index.html ). The code is publicly available at https://github.com/harris26-G/SaD .

Medication recommendation aims to generate safe and effective medication sets from health records. However, accurately recommending medications hinges on inferring a patient’s latent clinical condition from sparse and noisy observations, which requires both (i) preserving the visit-level combinatorial semantics of co-occurring diagnoses/procedures and (ii) leveraging informative historical references through effective, visit-conditioned retrieval. Most existing methods fall short in one of these aspects: graph-based modeling often fragments higher-order intra-visit patterns into pairwise relations, while inter-visit augmentation methods commonly exhibit an imbalance between learning a globally stable representation space and performing dynamic retrieval within it. To address these limitations, this article proposes HypeMed , a two-stage hypergraph-based framework unifying intra-visit coherence modeling and inter-visit augmentation. HypeMed consists of two components: MedRep for representation pretraining and SimMR for similarity-enhanced recommendation. In the first stage, MedRep encodes clinical visits as hyperedges via knowledge-aware contrastive pretraining, creating a globally consistent, retrieval-friendly embedding space. In the second stage, SimMR performs dynamic retrieval within this space, fusing retrieved references with the patient’s longitudinal data to refine medication prediction. Evaluation on real-world benchmarks shows that HypeMed outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both recommendation precision and DDI reduction, simultaneously enhancing the effectiveness and safety of clinical decision support. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/xansar/HypeMed .

Yuhong Dai, Jianxun Lian, Yitian Huang, Wei Zhang, Mingyang Zhou, Mingqi Wu, Xing Xie, Hao Liao. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed worldwide, yet their ability to navigate cultural nuances remains underexplored.Misinterpreting cultural content can lead to AI-generated responses that are offensive or inappropriate, limiting their usability in global applications such as customer service, diplomatic communication, and online education.While prior research has evaluated cultural knowledge of LLMs, existing benchmarks fail to assess dynamic cultural competencethe ability to apply cultural knowledge effectively in real-world interactions.To address this gap, we introduce SocialCC, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate cultural competence through multi-turn interactive intercultural scenarios.It comprises 3,060 human-written scenarios spanning 60 countries across six continents.Through extensive experiments on eight prominent LLMs, our findings reveal a significant gap between the cultural knowledge stored in these models and their ability to apply it effectively in cross-cultural communication.We release our code and data at https: //github.com/jincenziwu/SocialCC.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable capabilities in mining graph-structured data. However, conventional GNNs often encounter various fairness issues, such as predictions with prejudices when dealing with nodes with different sensitive attributes like genders or races, or significantly different prediction performance when facing nodes with different degrees. Existing studies mainly focus on addressing one specific fairness issue, neglecting the fact that a GNN model may face multiple unfairness simultaneously in reality, and addressing only one specific fairness may still leave the GNNs in an unfair status.

Lei Wang, Jianxun Lian, Yi Huang, Yanqi Dai, Haoxuan Li, Xu Chen, Xing Xie, Ji-Rong Wen. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across tasks such as mathematics, coding, and reasoning, yet their learning ability, which is crucial for adapting to dynamic environments and acquiring new knowledge, remains underexplored. In this work, we address this gap by introducing a framework inspired by cognitive psychology and education. Specifically, we decompose general learning ability into three distinct, complementary dimensions: *Learning from Instructor* (acquiring knowledge via explicit guidance), *Learning from Concept* (internalizing abstract structures and generalizing to new contexts), and *Learning from Experience* (adapting through accumulated exploration and feedback). We conduct a comprehensive empirical study across the three learning dimensions and identify several insightful findings, such as (i) interaction improves learning; (ii) conceptual understanding is scale-emergent and benefits larger models; and (iii) LLMs are effective few-shot learners but not many-shot learners. Based on our framework and empirical findings, we introduce a benchmark that provides a unified and realistic evaluation of LLMs' general learning abilities across three learning cognition dimensions. It enables diagnostic insights and supports evaluation and development of more adaptive and human-like models.

Large language models (LLMs) typically generate identical or similar responses for all users given the same prompt, posing serious safety risks in high-stakes applications where user vulnerabilities differ widely. Existing safety evaluations primarily rely on context-independent metrics—such as factuality, bias, or toxicity—overlooking the fact that the same response may carry divergent risks depending on the user's background or condition. We introduce ``personalized safety'' to fill this gap and present PENGUIN—a benchmark comprising 14,000 scenarios across seven sensitive domains with both context-rich and context-free variants. Evaluating six leading LLMs, we demonstrate that personalized user information significantly improves safety scores by 43.2%, confirming the effectiveness of personalization in safety alignment. However, not all context attributes contribute equally to safety enhancement. To address this, we develop RAISE—a training-free, two-stage agent framework that strategically acquires user-specific background. RAISE improves safety scores by up to 31.6% over six vanilla LLMs, while maintaining a low interaction cost of just 2.7 user queries on average. Our findings highlight the importance of selective information gathering in safety-critical domains and offer a practical solution for personalizing LLM responses without model retraining. This work establishes a foundation for safety research that adapts to individual user contexts rather than assuming a universal harm standard.

Recommender models capture ever-changing user preferences by training with in-domain user behavior data. These models are typically lightweight, facilitating real-time and large-scale online services. However, these models often falter when tasked with providing more sophisticated functionalities, such as offering explanations or engaging in conversations. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a significant advancement towards artificial general intelligence, demonstrating impressive capabilities in instruction comprehension, reasoning, and human interaction. Unfortunately, LLMs lack the understanding of domain-specific item catalogs and behavioral patterns, especially in areas that deviate from general world knowledge, such as online e-commerce. This limitation makes them unsuitable to function as recommender models directly. In this article, we bridge the gap between recommender models and LLMs, combining their respective strengths to create an interactive recommender system. We present an efficient framework, termed as InteRecAgent , which utilizes LLMs as the brain and recommender models as instrumental tools. We first outline a minimal set of essential tools required to transform LLMs into InteRecAgent. To overcome specific challenges associated with LLM-based agents for recommender systems, we enhance three core components, covering memory mechanism, task planning, and tool learning abilities. The InteRecAgent empowers traditional recommender systems, like ID-based matrix factorization models, to evolve into versatile and interactive systems with a natural language interface through the integration of LLMs. Experimental results derived from three public datasets demonstrate that the InteRecAgent delivers strong performance as a conversational recommender system, surpassing general LLMs such as GPT-4.

Explainability is critical for recommender systems to ensure good user experience and facilitate designers to debug. However, generating explanations in recommender systems usually requires large efforts due to the dependency on additional data and case-by-case model design. One possible solution to these challenges is reasoning with logic rules, whose validity or confidence can automatically indicate high-quality explanations and formats are general. However, pioneer methods can be hardly applied in recommendation due to the high sparsity of interaction data, which raises the difficulty in accurately computing the rule validity, and the specific ranking-oriented task. To bridge this gap, we propose a general framework for Reco mmendation with lo gic r ule reasoning ( Recolor ) that satisfies three desirable properties. First, we explicitly estimate the rule validity to ensure well-grounded decisions, where a fuzzy logic validity module is designed for accurate estimation on highly sparse recommendation data. Second, we ensure the generality for both the types of input data and model architectures by designing a neural logic generation module, which decouples the user–item representation learning from the rule construction. Third, we integrate the two above-mentioned modules with a ranking-oriented BPR loss and achieve a unified optimization of explainability and accuracy. For any given neural recommendation model, our proposed logic rule reasoning framework can upgrade it to a self-explainable version. Numerical experiments and user studies on four public recommendation datasets with different levels of sparsity demonstrate that our framework shows high-validity rule explanations, generality in architecture and data, and high recommendation accuracy.

In recent years, recommender systems have achieved remarkable performance by using ensembles of heterogeneous models. However, this approach is costly due to the resources and inference latency proportional to the number of models, creating a bottleneck for production. Our work aims at transfering the ensemble knowledge of heterogeneous teachers to a lightweight student model using knowledge distillation (KD), reducing inference costs while maintaining high accuracy. We find that the efficacy of distillation decreases when transferring knowledge from heterogeneous teachers. To address this, we propose a new KD framework, named HetComp, that guides the student model by transferring easy-to-hard sequences of knowledge generated from teachers’ trajectories. HetComp uses dynamic knowledge construction to provide progressively difficult ranking knowledge and adaptive knowledge transfer to gradually transfer finer-grained ranking information. Although HetComp improves accuracy, it exacerbates popularity bias, resulting in a high popularity lift. To mitigate this issue, we introduce two strategies that leverage models’ disagreement knowledge (i.e., dissensus) for heterogeneous comparison. Our experiments demonstrate that HetComp significantly enhances distillation quality and the student model’s generalization capabilities. Furthermore, we provide extensive experimental results supporting the effectiveness of our dissensus-based debiasing techniques in mitigating the popularity lift caused by HetComp.

Retrieval models aim at selecting a small set of item candidates which match the preference of a given user. They play a vital role in large-scale recommender systems since subsequent models such as rankers highly depend on the quality of item candidates. However, most existing retrieval models employ a single-round inference paradigm, which may not adequately capture the dynamic nature of user preferences and stuck in one area in the item space. In this paper, we propose Ada-Retrieval, an adaptive multi-round retrieval paradigm for recommender systems that iteratively refines user representations to better capture potential candidates in the full item space. Ada-Retrieval comprises two key modules: the item representation adapter and the user representation adapter, designed to inject context information into items' and users' representations. The framework maintains a model-agnostic design, allowing seamless integration with various backbone models such as RNNs or Transformers. We perform experiments on three widely used public datasets, incorporating five powerful sequential recommenders as backbone models. Our results demonstrate that Ada-Retrieval significantly enhances the performance of various base models, with consistent improvements observed across different datasets. Our code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/ll0ruc/Ada-Retrieval.

Wensheng Lu, Jianxun Lian, Wei Zhang, Guanghua Li, Mingyang Zhou, Hao Liao, Xing Xie. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Emotion significantly impacts our daily behaviors and interactions. While recent generative AI models, such as large language models, have shown impressive performance in various tasks, it remains unclear whether they truly comprehend emotions and why. This paper aims to address this gap by incorporating psychological theories to gain a holistic understanding of emotions in generative AI models. Specifically, we propose three approaches: 1) EmotionPrompt to enhance AI model performance, 2) EmotionAttack to impair AI model performance, and 3) EmotionDecode to explain the effects of emotional stimuli, both benign and malignant. Through extensive experiments involving language and multi-modal models on semantic understanding, logical reasoning, and generation tasks, we demonstrate that both textual and visual EmotionPrompt can boost the performance of AI models while EmotionAttack can hinder it. More importantly, EmotionDecode reveals that AI models can comprehend emotional stimuli akin to the mechanism of dopamine in the human brain. Our work heralds a novel avenue for exploring psychology to enhance our understanding of generative AI models, thus boosting the research and development of human-AI collaboration and mitigating potential risks.

As the non-fungible token (NFT) market flourishes, price prediction emerges as a pivotal direction for investors gaining valuable insight to maximize returns. However, existing works suffer from a lack of practical definitions and standardized evaluations, limiting their practical application. Moreover, the influence of users' multi-behaviour transactions that are publicly accessible on NFT price is still not explored and exhibits challenges. In this paper, we address these gaps by presenting a practical and hierarchical problem definition. This approach unifies both collection-level and token-level task and evaluation methods, which cater to varied practical requirements of investors. To further understand the impact of user behaviours on the variation of NFT price, we propose a general wallet profiling framework and develop a COmmunity enhanced Multi-bEhavior Transaction graph model, named COMET. COMET profiles wallets with a comprehensive view and considers the impact of diverse relations and interactions within the NFT ecosystem on NFT price variations, thereby improving prediction performance. Extensive experiments conducted in our deployed system demonstrate the superiority of COMET, underscoring its potential in the insight toolkit for NFT investors.

Recommender systems are widely used in online services, with embedding-based models being particularly popular due to their expressiveness in representing complex signals. However, these models often function as a black box, making them less transparent and reliable for both users and developers. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable intelligence in understanding, reasoning, and instruction following. This paper presents the initial exploration of using LLMs as surrogate models to explaining black-box recommender models. The primary concept involves training LLMs to comprehend and emulate the behavior of target recommender models. By leveraging LLMs' own extensive world knowledge and multi-step reasoning abilities, these aligned LLMs can serve as advanced surrogates, capable of reasoning about observations. Moreover, employing natural language as an interface allows for the creation of customizable explanations that can be adapted to individual user preferences. To facilitate an effective alignment, we introduce three methods: behavior alignment, intention alignment, and hybrid alignment. Behavior alignment operates in the language space, representing user preferences and item information as text to mimic the target model's behavior; intention alignment works in the latent space of the recommendation model, using user and item representations to understand the model's behavior; hybrid alignment combines both language and latent spaces. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three public datasets show that our approach yields promising results in understanding and mimicking target models, producing high-quality, high-fidelity, and distinct explanations. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/RecAI.

Recommendation systems guide users in locating their desired information within extensive content repositories. Usually, a recommendation model is optimized to enhance accuracy metrics from a user utility standpoint, such as click-through rate or matching relevance. However, a responsible industrial recommendation model must address not only user utility (responsibility to users) but also other objectives, including increasing platform revenue (responsibility to platforms), ensuring fairness (responsibility to content creators), and maintaining unbiasedness (responsibility to long-term healthy development). Multi-objective learning is a promising approach for achieving responsible recommendation models. Nevertheless, current methods encounter two challenges: difficulty in scaling to heterogeneous objectives within a unified framework, and inadequate controllability over objective priority during optimization, leading to uncontrollable solutions.

Yi Liu, Yuan Tian, Jianxun Lian, Xinlong Wang, Yanan Cao, Fang Fang, Wen Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Recently, the bias-related issues in GNN-based link prediction have raised widely spread concerns. In this paper, we emphasize the bias on links across different node clusters, which we call cross-links, after considering its significance in both easing information cocoons and preserving graph connectivity. Instead of following the objective-oriented mechanism in prior works with compromised utility, we empirically find that existing GNN models face severe data bias between internal-links (links within the same cluster) and cross-links, and this inspires us to rethink the bias issue on cross-links from a data perspective. Specifically, we design a simple yet effective twin-structure framework, which can be easily applied to most of GNNs to mitigate the bias as well as boost their utility in an end-to-end manner. The basic idea is to generate debiased node embeddings as demonstrations, and fuse them into the embeddings of original GNNs. In particular, we learn debiased node embeddings with the help of augmented supervision signals, and a novel dynamic training strategy is designed to effectively fuse debiased node embeddings with the original node embeddings. Experiments on three datasets with six common GNNs show that our framework can not only alleviate the bias between internal-links and cross-links, but also boost the overall accuracy. Comparisons with other state-of-the-art methods also verify the superiority of our method.

Intrinsic interpretable graph neural networks aim to provide transparent predictions by identifying the influential fraction of the input graph that guides the model prediction, i.e., the explanatory subgraph. However, current interpretable GNNs mostly are dataset-specific and hard to generalize to different graphs. A more generalizable GNN interpretation model which can effectively distill the universal structural patterns of different graphs is until-now unexplored. Motivated by the great success of recent pre-training techniques, we for the first time propose the Pre-training Interpretable Graph Neural Network ($\pi$-GNN) to distill the universal interpretability of GNNs by pre-training over synthetic graphs with ground-truth explanations. Specifically, we introduce a structural pattern learning module to extract diverse universal structure patterns and integrate them together to comprehensively represent the graphs of different types. Next, a hypergraph refining module is proposed to identify the explanatory subgraph by incorporating the universal structure patterns with local edge interactions. Finally, the task-specific predictor is cascaded with the pre-trained $\pi$-GNN model and fine-tuned over downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that $\pi$-GNN significantly surpasses the leading interpretable GNN baselines with up to 9.98\% interpretation improvement and 16.06\% classification accuracy improvement. Meanwhile, $\pi$-GNN pre-trained on graph classification task also achieves the top-tier interpretation performance on node classification task, which further verifies its promising generalization performance among different downstream tasks. Our code and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PI-GNN-F86C

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a widely used and effective technique for recommender systems. In recent decades, there have been significant advancements in latent embedding-based CF methods for improved accuracy, such as matrix factorization, neural collaborative filtering, and LightGCN. However, the explainability of these models has not been fully explored. Adding explainability to recommendation models can not only increase trust in the decision-making process, but also have multiple benefits such as providing persuasive explanations for item recommendations, creating explicit profiles for users and items, and assisting item producers in design improvements.

Recent recommender systems have shown remarkable performance by using an ensemble of heterogeneous models. However, it is exceedingly costly because it requires resources and inference latency proportional to the number of models, which remains the bottleneck for production. Our work aims to transfer the ensemble knowledge of heterogeneous teachers to a lightweight student model using knowledge distillation (KD), to reduce the huge inference costs while retaining high accuracy. Through an empirical study, we find that the efficacy of distillation severely drops when transferring knowledge from heterogeneous teachers. Nevertheless, we show that an important signal to ease the difficulty can be obtained from the teacher’s training trajectory. This paper proposes a new KD framework, named HetComp, that guides the student model by transferring easy-to-hard sequences of knowledge generated from the teachers’ trajectories. To provide guidance according to the student’s learning state, HetComp uses dynamic knowledge construction to provide progressively difficult ranking knowledge and adaptive knowledge transfer to gradually transfer finer-grained ranking information. Our comprehensive experiments show that HetComp significantly improves the distillation quality and the generalization of the student model.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have seen widespread usage across multiple real-world applications, yet in transductive learning, they still face challenges in accuracy, efficiency, and scalability, due to the extensive number of trainable parameters in the embedding table and the paradigm of stacking neighborhood aggregations. This paper presents a novel model called xGCN for large-scale network embedding, which is a practical solution for link predictions. xGCN addresses these issues by encoding graph-structure data in an extreme convolutional manner, and has the potential to push the performance of network embedding-based link predictions to a new record. Specifically, instead of assigning each node with a directly learnable embedding vector, xGCN regards node embeddings as static features. It uses a propagation operation to smooth node embeddings and relies on a Refinement neural Network (RefNet) to transform the coarse embeddings derived from the unsupervised propagation into new ones that optimize a training objective. The output of RefNet, which are well-refined embeddings, will replace the original node embeddings. This process is repeated iteratively until the model converges to a satisfying status. Experiments on three social network datasets with link prediction tasks show that xGCN not only achieves the best accuracy compared with a series of competitive baselines but also is highly efficient and scalable.

Recommender systems play a significant role in online services and have attracted wide attention from both academia and industry. In this paper, we focus on an important, practical, but often overlooked task: domain-level zero-shot recommendation (DZSR). The challenge of DZSR mainly lies in the absence of collaborative behaviors in the target domain, which may be caused by various reasons, such as the domain being newly launched without existing user-item interactions, or users' behaviors being too sensitive to collect for training. To address this challenge, we propose a Transferable Interest Graph Embedding technique for Recommendations (Tiger). The key idea is to connect isolated collaborative filtering datasets with a knowledge graph tailored to recommendations, then propagate collaborative signals from public domains to the zero-shot target domain. The backbone of Tiger is the transferable interest extractor, which is a simple yet effective graph convolutional network (GCN) aggregating multiple hops of neighbors on a shared interest graph. We find that the bottom layers of GCN preserve more domain-specific information while the upper layers represent universal interest better. Thus, in Tiger, we discard the bottom layers of GCN to reconstruct user interest so that collaborative signals can be successfully propagated to other domains, and retain the bottom layers of GCN to include domain-specific information for items. Extensive experiments with four public datasets demonstrate that Tiger can effectively make recommendations for a zero-shot domain and outperform several alternative baselines.

As the fundamental basis of sponsored search, relevance modeling measures the closeness between the input queries and the candidate ads. Conventional relevance models solely rely on the textual data, which suffer from the scarce semantic signals within the short queries. Recently, user historical click behaviors are incorporated in the format of click graphs to provide additional correlations beyond pure textual semantics, which contributes to advancing the relevance modeling performance. However, user behaviors are usually arbitrary and unpredictable, leading to the noisy and sparse graph topology. In addition, there exist other types of user behaviors besides clicks, which may also provide complementary information. In this paper, we study the novel problem of heterogeneous behavior graph learning to facilitate relevance modeling task. Our motivation lies in learning an optimal and task-relevant heterogeneous behavior graph consisting of multiple types of user behaviors. We further propose a novel HBGLR model to learn the behavior graph structure by mining the sophisticated correlations between node semantics and graph topology, and encode the textual semantics and structural heterogeneity into the learned representations. Our proposal is evaluated over real-world industry datasets, and has been mainstreamed in the Bing ads. Both offline and online experimental results demonstrate its superiority.

Friend recommendation service plays an important role in shaping and facilitating the growth of online social networks. Graph embedding models, which can learn low-dimensional embeddings for nodes in the social graph to effectively represent the proximity between nodes, have been widely adopted for friend recommendations. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated superiority over shallow graph embedding methods, thanks to their ability to explicitly encode neighborhood context. This is also verified in our Xbox friend recommendation scenario, where some simplified GNNs, such as LightGCN and PPRGo, achieve the best performance. However, we observe that many GNN variants, including LightGCN and PPRGo, use a static and pre-defined normalizer in neighborhood aggregation, which is decoupled with the representation learning process and can cause the scale distortion issue. As a consequence, the true power of GNNs has not yet been fully demonstrated in friend recommendations.

The wide spread of fake news has caused serious societal issues. We propose a subgraph reasoning paradigm for fake news detection, which provides a crystal type of explainability by revealing which subgraphs of the news propagation network are the most important for news verification, and concurrently improves the generalization and discrimination power of graph-based detection models by removing task-irrelevant information. In particular, we propose a reinforced subgraph generation method, and perform fine-grained modeling on the generated subgraphs by developing a Hierarchical Path-aware Kernel Graph Attention Network. We also design a curriculum-based optimization method to ensure better convergence and train the two parts in an end-to-end manner.

A large-scale recommender system usually consists of recall and ranking modules. The goal of ranking modules (aka rankers) is to elaborately discriminate users' preference on item candidates proposed by recall modules. With the success of deep learning techniques in various domains, we have witnessed the mainstream rankers evolve from traditional models to deep neural models. However, the way that we design and use rankers remains unchanged: offline training the model, freezing the parameters, and deploying it for online serving. Actually, the candidate items are determined by specific user requests, in which underlying distributions (e.g., the proportion of items for different categories, the proportion of popular or new items) are highly different from one another in a production environment. The classical parameter-frozen inference manner cannot adapt to dynamic serving circumstances, making rankers' performance compromised.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated strong power in mining various graph-structure data. Since real-world graphs are usually on a large scale, training scalable GNNs has become one of the research trends in recent years. Existing methods only produce one single model to serve all nodes. However, different nodes may exhibit various properties thus require diverse models, especially when the graph is large. Forcing all nodes to share a unified model will decrease the model's expressiveness. What is worse, some small groups' patterns are prone to be ignored by the model due to their minority, making these nodes unpredictable and even some raising potential unfairness problems. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic framework Ada-GNN that provides personalized GNN models for specific sets of nodes. Intuitively, it is desirable that every node has its own model. But considering the efficiency and scalability of the framework, we generate specific GNN models at the subgroup-level rather than individual node-level. To be specific, Ada-GNN first splits the original graph into several non-overlapped subgroups and tags each node with its subgroup label. After that, a meta adapter is proposed to adapt a base GNN model to each subgroup rapidly. To better facilitate the global-to-local knowledge adaption, we design a feature enhancement module that captures the distinctions among different subgroups to improve the Ada-GNN's performance. Ada-GNN is model-agnostic and can be equipped to almost all existing scalable GNN based methods such as GraphSAGE, ClusterGCN, SIGN, and SAGN. We conduct extensive experiments with six popular scalable GNN as base methods on two large-scale datasets, and the results consistently demonstrate the generality and superiority of Ada-GNN.

User interest exploration is an important and challenging topic in recommender systems, which alleviates the closed-loop effects between recommendation models and user-item interactions.Contextual bandit (CB) algorithms strive to make a good trade-off between exploration and exploitation so that users' potential interests have chances to expose. However, classical CB algorithms can only be applied to a small, sampled item set (usually hundreds), which forces the typical applications in recommender systems limited to candidate post-ranking, homepage top item ranking, ad creative selection, or online model selection (A/B test). In this paper, we introduce two simple but effective hierarchical CB algorithms to make a classical CB model (such as LinUCB and Thompson Sampling) capable to explore users' interest in the entire item space without limiting to a small item set. We first construct a hierarchy item tree via a bottom-up clustering algorithm to organize items in a coarse-to-fine manner. Then we propose ahierarchical CB (HCB) algorithm to explore users' interest on the hierarchy tree. HCB takes the exploration problem as a series of decision-making processes, where the goal is to find a path from the root to a leaf node, and the feedback will be back-propagated to all the nodes in the path. We further propose aprogressive hierarchical CB (pHCB) algorithm, which progressively extends visible nodes which reach a confidence level for exploration, to avoid misleading actions on upper-level nodes in the sequential decision-making process. Extensive experiments on two public recommendation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our methods.

News recommendation systems play a key role in online news reading service. Knowledge graphs (KG), which contain comprehensive structural knowledge, are well known for their potential to enhance both accuracy and explainability. While existing works intensively study using KG to improve news recommendation accuracy, using KG for news recommendation reasoning has not been fully explored. A few works such as KPRN [18], [22] and ADAC [25] have discussed knowledge reasoning in some other recommendation domains such as music or movie, but their methods are not practical for the news. How to make reasoning scalable to generic KGs, easy to deploy for real-time serving and meanwhile elastic for both recall and ranking stages remains an open question.

Self-attention networks (SANs) have been intensively applied for sequential recommenders, but they are limited due to: (1) the quadratic complexity and vulnerability to over-parameterization in self-attention; (2) inaccurate modeling of sequential relations between items due to the implicit position encoding. In this work, we propose the low-rank decomposed self-attention networks (LightSANs) to overcome these problems. Particularly, we introduce the low-rank decomposed self-attention, which projects user's historical items into a small constant number of latent interests and leverages item-to-interest interaction to generate the context-aware representation. It scales linearly w.r.t. the user's historical sequence length in terms of time and space, and is more resilient to over-parameterization. Besides, we design the decoupled position encoding, which models the sequential relations between items more precisely. Extensive experimental studies are carried out on three real-world datasets, where LightSANs outperform the existing SANs-based recommenders in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.

Representation learning on user-item graph for recommendation has evolved from using single ID or interaction history to exploiting higher-order neighbors. This leads to the success of graph convolution networks (GCNs) for recommendation such as PinSage and LightGCN. Despite effectiveness, we argue that they suffer from two limitations: (1) high-degree nodes exert larger impact on the representation learning, deteriorating the recommendations of low-degree (long-tail) items; and (2) representations are vulnerable to noisy interactions, as the neighborhood aggregation scheme further enlarges the impact of observed edges.

Fangzhao Wu, Ying Qiao, Jiun-Hung Chen, Chuhan Wu, Tao Qi, Jianxun Lian, Danyang Liu, Xing Xie, Jianfeng Gao, Winnie Wu, Ming Zhou. Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2020.

The whole globe has cranked up for coping with the COVID-19 situation. The hands-on tutorial targets at providing a comprehensive and pragmatic end-to-end walk-through for building an academic research paper recommender for the use case of COVID-19 related study, with the help of knowledge graph technology. The code examples that demonstrate the theories are reproducible and can hopefully provide value for researchers to build tools that support conducting research to find a cure to COVID-19.

News articles usually contain knowledge entities such as celebrities or organizations. Important entities in articles carry key messages and help to understand the content in a more direct way. An industrial news recommender system contains various key applications, such as personalized recommendation, item-to-item recommendation, news category classification, news popularity prediction and local news detection. We find that incorporating knowledge entities for better document understanding benefits these applications consistently. However, existing document understanding models either represent news articles without considering knowledge entities (e.g., BERT) or rely on a specific type of text encoding model (e.g., DKN) so that the generalization ability and efficiency is compromised. In this paper, we propose KRED, which is a fast and effective model to enhance arbitrary document representation with a knowledge graph. KRED first enriches entities’ embeddings by attentively aggregating information from their neighborhood in the knowledge graph. Then a context embedding layer is applied to annotate the dynamic context of different entities such as frequency, category and position. Finally, an information distillation layer aggregates the entity embeddings under the guidance of the original document representation and transforms the document vector into a new one. We advocate to optimize the model with a multi-task framework, so that different news recommendation applications can be united and useful information can be shared across different tasks. Experiments on a real-world Microsoft News dataset demonstrate that KRED greatly benefits a variety of news recommendation applications.

Candidate generation is a critical task for recommendation system, which is technically challenging from two perspectives. On the one hand, recommendation system requires the comprehensive inclusion of user's interested candidates, yet typical deep user modeling approaches would represent each user as an onefold vector, which is hard to capture user's diverse interests. On the other hand, for the sake of practicability, the candidate generation process needs to be both accurate and efficient. Although existing "multi-channel structures'', like memory networks, are more capable of representing user's diverse interests, they may bring in substantial irrelevant candidates and lead to rapid growth of temporal cost. As a result, it remains a tough issue to comprehensively acquire user's interested items in a practical way.

Deep recommender systems have achieved remarkable improvements in recent years. Despite its superior ranking precision, the running efficiency and memory consumption turn out to be severe bottlenecks in reality. To overcome both limitations, we propose LightRec, a lightweight recommender system which enjoys fast online inference and economic memory consumption. The backbone of LightRec is a total of B codebooks, each of which is composed of W latent vectors, known as codewords. On top of such a structure, LightRec will have an item represented as additive composition of B codewords, which are optimally selected from each of the codebooks. To effectively learn the codebooks from data, we devise an end-to-end learning workflow, where challenges on the inherent differentiability and diversity are conquered by the proposed techniques. In addition, to further improve the representation quality, several distillation strategies are employed, which better preserves user-item relevance scores and relative ranking orders. LightRec is extensively evaluated with four real-world datasets, which gives rise to two empirical findings: 1) compared with those the state-of-the-art lightweight baselines, LightRec achieves over 11% relative improvements in terms of recall performance; 2) compared to conventional recommendation algorithms, LightRec merely incurs negligible accuracy degradation while leads to more than 27x speedup in top-k recommendation.

Recent years have witnessed a phenomenal success of agent-initiated social e-commerce models, which encourage users to become selling agents to promote items through their social connections. The complex interactions in this type of social e-commerce can be formulated as Heterogeneous Information Networks (HIN), where there are numerous types of relations between three types of nodes, i.e., users, selling agents and items. Learning high quality node embeddings is of key interest, and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently been established as the latest state-of-the-art methods in representation learning. However, prior GCN models have fundamental limitations in both modeling heterogeneous relations and efficiently sampling relevant receptive field from vast neighborhood. To address these problems, we propose RecoGCN, which stands for a RElation-aware CO-attentive GCN model, to effectively aggregate heterogeneous features in a HIN. It makes up current GCN's limitation in modelling heterogeneous relations with a relation-aware aggregator, and leverages the semantic-aware meta-paths to carve out concise and relevant receptive fields for each node. To effectively fuse the embeddings learned from different meta-paths, we further develop a co-attentive mechanism to dynamically assign importance weights to different meta-paths by attending the three-way interactions among users, selling agents and items. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate RecoGCN is able to learn meaningful node embeddings in HIN, and consistently outperforms baseline methods in recommendation tasks.

User modeling is an essential task for online recommender systems. In the past few decades, collaborative filtering (CF) techniques have been well studied to model users' long term preferences. Recently, recurrent neural networks (RNN) have shown a great advantage in modeling users' short term preference. A natural way to improve the recommender is to combine both long-term and short-term modeling. Previous approaches neglect the importance of dynamically integrating these two user modeling paradigms. Moreover, users' behaviors are much more complex than sentences in language modeling or images in visual computing, thus the classical structures of RNN such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) need to be upgraded for better user modeling. In this paper, we improve the traditional RNN structure by proposing a time-aware controller and a content-aware controller, so that contextual information can be well considered to control the state transition. We further propose an attention-based framework to combine users' long-term and short-term preferences, thus users' representation can be generated adaptively according to the specific context. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-art methods consistently.

The success of recommender systems in modern online platforms is inseparable from the accurate capture of users' personal tastes. In everyday life, large amounts of user feedback data are created along with user-item online interactions in a variety of ways, such as browsing, purchasing, and sharing. These multiple types of user feedback provide us with tremendous opportunities to detect individuals' fine-grained preferences. Different from most existing recommender systems that rely on a single type of feedback, we advocate incorporating multiple types of user-item interactions for better recommendations. Based on the observation that the underlying spectrum of user preferences is reflected in various types of interactions with items and can be uncovered by latent relational learning in metric space, we propose a unified neural learning framework, named Multi-Relational Memory Network (MRMN). It can not only model fine-grained user-item relations but also enable us to discriminate between feedback types in terms of the strength and diversity of user preferences. Extensive experiments show that the proposed MRMN model outperforms competitive state-of-the-art algorithms in a wide range of scenarios, including e-commerce, local services, and job recommendations.

Millions of news articles emerge every day. How to provide personalized news recommendations has become a critical task for service providers. In the past few decades, latent factor models has been widely used for building recommender systems (RSs). With the remarkable success of deep learning techniques especially in visual computing and natural language understanding, more and more researchers have been trying to leverage deep neural networks to learn latent representations for advanced RSs. Following mainstream deep learning-based RSs, we propose a novel deep fusion model (DFM), which aims to improve the representation learning abilities in deep RSs and can be used for both candidate retrieval and item re-ranking. There are two key components in our DFM approach, namely an inception module and an attention mechanism. The inception module improves the plain multi-layer network via leveraging of various levels of interaction simultaneously, while the attention mechanism merges latent representations learnt from different channels in a customized fashion. We conduct extensive experiments on a commercial news reading dataset, and the results demonstrate that the proposed DFM is superior to several state-of-the-art models.

Combinatorial features are essential for the success of many commercial models. Manually crafting these features usually comes with high cost due to the variety, volume and velocity of raw data in web-scale systems. Factorization based models, which measure interactions in terms of vector product, can learn patterns of combinatorial features automatically and generalize to unseen features as well. With the great success of deep neural networks (DNNs) in various fields, recently researchers have proposed several DNN-based factorization model to learn both low- and high-order feature interactions. Despite the powerful ability of learning an arbitrary function from data, plain DNNs generate feature interactions implicitly and at the bit-wise level. In this paper, we propose a novel Compressed Interaction Network (CIN), which aims to generate feature interactions in an explicit fashion and at the vector-wise level. We show that the CIN share some functionalities with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). We further combine a CIN and a classical DNN into one unified model, and named this new model eXtreme Deep Factorization Machine (xDeepFM). On one hand, the xDeepFM is able to learn certain bounded-degree feature interactions explicitly; on the other hand, it can learn arbitrary low- and high-order feature interactions implicitly. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets. Our results demonstrate that xDeepFM outperforms state-of-the-art models. We have released the source code of xDeepFM at https://github.com/Leavingseason/xDeepFM.

News recommendation has become a big attraction with which major Web search portals retain their users. Two effective approaches are Content-based Filtering and Collaborative Filtering, each serving a specific recommendation scenario. The Content-based Filtering approaches inspect rich contexts of the recommended items, while the Collaborative Filtering approaches predict the interests of long-tail users by collaboratively learning from interests of related users. We have observed empirically that, for the problem of news topic displaying, both the rich context of news topics and the long-tail users exist. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Content-based Collaborative Filtering approach (CCF) to bring both Content-based Filtering and Collaborative Filtering approaches together. We found that combining the two is not an easy task, but the benefits of CCF are impressive. On one hand, CCF makes recommendations based on the rich contexts of the news. On the other hand, CCF collaboratively analyzes the scarce feedbacks from the long-tail users. We tailored this CCF approach for the news topic displaying on the Bing front page and demonstrated great gains in attracting users. In the experiments and analyses part of this paper, we discuss the performance gains and insights in news topic recommendation in Bing.