Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) critically depends on effective query expansion to retrieve relevant information. However, existing expansion methods adopt uniform strategies that overlook user-specific semantics, ignoring individual expression styles, preferences, and historical context. In practice, identical queries in text can express vastly different intentions across users. This representational rigidity limits the ability of current RAG systems to generalize effectively in personalized settings. Specifically, we identify two core challenges for personalization: 1) user expression styles are inherently diverse, making it difficult for standard expansions to preserve personalized intent. 2) user corpora induce heterogeneous semantic structures—varying in topical focus and lexical organization—which hinders the effective anchoring of expanded queries within the user’s corpora space. To address these challenges, we propose Personalize Before Retrieve (PBR), a framework that incorporates user-specific signals into query expansion prior to retrieval. PBR consists of two components: P-PRF, which generates stylistically aligned pseudo feedback using user history for simulating user expression style, and P-Anchor, which performs graph-based structure alignment over user corpora to capture its structure. Together, they produce personalized query representations tailored for retrieval. Experiments on two personalized benchmarks show that PBR consistently outperforms strong baselines, with up to 10% gains on PersonaBench across retrievers. Our findings demonstrate the value of modeling personalization before retrieval to close the semantic gap in user-adaptive RAG systems.

Xiaopeng Li, Yuanjin Zheng, Wanyu Wang, Wenlin Zhang, Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Haiying He, Mengyang Ma, Yiqi Wang, Maolin Wang, Xuetao Wei, Xiangyu Zhao. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

diningIn recommender systems, online A/B testing is a crucial method for evaluating the performance of different models. However, conducting online A/B testing often presents significant challenges, including substantial economic costs, user experience degradation, and considerable time requirements. With the Large Language Models' powerful capacity, LLM-based agent shows great potential to replace traditional online A/B testing. Nonetheless, current agents fail to simulate the perception process and interaction patterns, due to the lack of real environments and visual perception capability. To address these challenges, we introduce a multi-modal user agent for A/B testing (A/B Agent). Specifically, we construct a recommendation sandbox environment for A/B testing, enabling multimodal and multi-page interactions that align with real user behavior on online platforms. The designed agent leverages multimodal information perception, fine-grained user preferences, and integrates profiles, action memory retrieval, and a fatigue system to simulate complex human decision-making. We validated the potential of the agent as an alternative to traditional A/B testing from three perspectives: model, data, and features. Furthermore, we found that the data generated by A/B Agent can effectively enhance the capabilities of recommendation models. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/ABAgent. © 2026 Owner/Author.

Personalization is becoming a core capability of modern AI systems. It enables systems to adapt their responses and behaviors according to individual users' preferences, contexts, and goals. Recent research has focused on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and its development toward more advanced agent-based frameworks to improve user satisfaction in personalized settings. In this tutorial, we provide a systematic overview of how personalization can be incorporated into the three main stages of RAG: pre-retrieval, retrieval, and generation. We then extend the discussion to personalized LLM-based agents, which build on RAG by adding agent capabilities such as user understanding, personalized planning and execution, and adaptive response generation. For both RAG-based and agent-based approaches, we present clear definitions, review recent research, and summarize commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. We also discuss key challenges, current limitations, and potential future research directions. An updated list of related papers and resources is available at our GitHub repository. https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/Awesome-Personalized-RAG-Agent. Further updates for this tutorial will be uploaded on the homepage. https://applied-machine-learning-lab.github.io/SIGIR2026_PRAG_Tutorial.

Deep Research agents driven by LLMs have automated the scholarly discovery pipeline, from planning and query formulation to iterative web exploration. Yet they remain constrained by a static, ''one-size-fits-all'' retrieval paradigm. Current systems fail to adaptively adjust the depth and breadth of exploration based on the user's existing expertise or latent interests, frequently resulting in reports that are either redundant for experts or overly dense for novices. To address this, we introduce Personalized Deep Research (PDR), a framework that integrates dynamic user context into the core retrieval-reasoning loop. Rather than treating personalization as a post-hoc formatting step, PDR unifies user profile modeling with iterative query development, dual-stage (private/public) retrieval, and context-aware synthesis. This allows the system to autonomously align research sub-goals with user intent and optimize the stopping criteria for evidence collection. To facilitate benchmarking, we release the PDR Dataset, covering four realistic user tasks, and propose a hybrid evaluation framework combining lexical metrics with LLM-based judgments to assess factual accuracy and personalization alignment. Experimental results against commercial baselines demonstrate that PDR significantly improves retrieval utility and report relevance, effectively bridging the gap between generic information retrieval and personalized knowledge acquisition. The resource is available to the public at~ https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/SIGIR2026_PDR.

Transformer structures have been widely used in sequential recommender systems (SRS). However, as user interaction histories increase, computational time and memory requirements also grow. This is mainly caused by the standard attention mechanism. Although there exist many methods employing efficient attention and SSM-based models, these approaches struggle to effectively model long sequences and may exhibit unstable performance on short sequences. To address these challenges, we design a sparse attention mechanism, BlossomRec, which models both long-term and short-term user interests through attention computation to achieve stable performance across sequences of varying lengths. Specifically, we categorize user interests in recommendation systems into long-term and short-term interests, and compute them using two distinct sparse attention patterns, with the results combined through a learnable gated output. Theoretically, it significantly reduces the number of interactions participating in attention computation. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that BlossomRec, when integrated with state-of-the-art Transformer-based models, achieves comparable or even superior performance while significantly reducing memory usage, providing strong evidence of BlossomRec's efficiency and effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/WWW2026_BlossomRec.

Deep search agents, which autonomously iterate through multi-turn web-based reasoning, represent a promising paradigm for complex information-seeking tasks. However, current agents suffer from critical inefficiency: they conduct excessive searches as they cannot accurately judge when to stop searching and start answering. This stems from outcome-centric training that prioritize final results over the search process itself. We identify the root cause as misaligned decision boundaries, the threshold determining when accumulated information suffices to answer. This causes over-search (redundant searching despite sufficient knowledge) and under-search (premature termination yielding incorrect answers). To address these errors, we propose a comprehensive framework comprising two key components. First, we introduce causal intervention-based diagnosis that identifies boundary errors by comparing factual and counterfactual trajectories at each decision point. Second, we develop Decision Boundary Alignment for Deep Search agents (DAS), which constructs preference datasets from causal feedback and aligns policies via preference optimization. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that decision boundary errors are pervasive across state-of-the-art agents. Our DAS method effectively calibrates these boundaries, mitigating both over-search and under-search to achieve substantial gains in accuracy and efficiency. Our code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/WWW2026-DAS. © 2026 Owner/Author.

Personalization has become an essential capability in modern AI systems, enabling customized interactions that align with individual user preferences, contexts, and goals. Recent research has increasingly concentrated on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks and their evolution into more advanced agent-based architectures within personalized settings to enhance user satisfaction. Building on this foundation, this survey systematically examines personalization across the three core stages of RAG: pre-retrieval, retrieval, and generation. Beyond RAG, we further extend its capabilities into the realm of Personalized LLM-based Agents, which enhance traditional RAG systems with agentic functionalities, including user understanding, personalized planning and execution, and dynamic generation. For both personalization in RAG and agent-based personalization, we provide formal definitions, conduct a comprehensive review of recent literature, and summarize key datasets and evaluation metrics. Additionally, we discuss fundamental challenges, limitations, and promising research directions in this evolving field. Relevant papers and resources are continuously updated at the Github Repo ( https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/Awesome-Personalized-RAG-Agent ).

Multi-Scenario Recommendation (MSR) tasks, referring to building a unified model to enhance performance across all recommendation scenarios, have recently gained considerable attention. However, current research in MSR faces two significant challenges that hinder the field's development: the absence of uniform procedures for multi-scenario dataset processing, thus hindering fair comparisons, and most models being closed-source, which complicates comparisons with current SOTA models. Consequently, we introduce our benchmark, Scenario-Wise Rec, which comprises six public datasets and twelve baseline models, along with a training and evaluation pipeline. We further validate Scenario-Wise Rec on an industrial advertising dataset, underscoring its robustness. We hope the benchmark will give researchers clear insights into prior work, enabling them to develop novel models and thereby fostering a collaborative research ecosystem in MSR. Our source code is publicly available (https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/Scenario-Wise-Rec).

Feature selection is crucial in recommender systems for improving model efficiency and predictive performance. Conventional approaches typically employ surrogate models-such as decision trees or neural networks-to estimate feature importance. However, their effectiveness is inherently constrained, as these models may struggle under suboptimal training conditions, including feature collinearity, high-dimensional sparsity, and insufficient data. In this paper, we propose SELF, a SurrogatE-Light Feature selection method for deep recommender systems. SELF integrates semantic reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs) with task-specific learning from surrogate models, enabling an automated and lightweight feature selection process. Specifically, LLMs first produce a semantically informed ranking of feature importance, which is subsequently refined by a surrogate model, effectively integrating general world knowledge with task-specific learning. Comprehensive experiments on three public datasets from real-world recommender platforms validate the effectiveness of SELF. To facilitate reproducibility, our code is publicly available.

Prompt engineering can significantly improve the performance of large language models (LLMs), with automated prompt optimization (APO) gaining significant attention due to the time-consuming and laborious nature of manual prompt design. However, much of the existing work in APO overlooks task-specific characteristics, resulting in prompts that lack domain specificity and are not well-suited for task-specific optimization. In this paper, we introduce TAPO, a multitask-aware prompt optimization framework composed of three key modules. First, a task-aware metric selection module is proposed to enhance task-specific prompt generation capabilities. Second, we present a multi-metrics evaluation module to jointly evaluate prompts from multiple perspectives. Third, an evolution-based optimization framework is introduced for automatic prompt refinement, which improves adaptability across various tasks. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and our code is publicly available1.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge, yet traditional RAG systems struggle with static workflows and limited adaptability for complex, multistep reasoning tasks. Agentic RAG systems, such as DeepResearch, address these issues through dynamic retrieval, iterative context refinement, and adaptive workflows. However, recent methods like Search-R1, which rely on outcome-based reinforcement learning, face challenges such as low exploration efficiency, gradient conflict, and sparse reward signals. To tackle these limitations, we introduce ReasonRAG, a novel method that leverages RAG-ProGUIDE—a high-quality dataset providing fine-grained, process-level rewards for query generation, evidence extraction, and answer generation. By employing process-supervised reinforcement learning, ReasonRAG enhances LLMs’ autonomous capabilities in search, query generation, evidence extraction, and answer synthesis. Experimental results show that ReasonRAG, utilizing RAG-ProGUIDE, outperforms existing approaches like Search-R1 and traditional RAG systems, achieving superior performance on five benchmark datasets with only 5k training instances—significantly fewer than the 90k required by Search-R1. Our code is available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/ReasonRAG.

Search engines are crucial as they provide an efficient and easy way to access vast amounts of information on the Internet for diverse information needs. User queries, even with a specific need, can differ significantly. Prior research has explored the resilience of ranking models against typical query variations like paraphrasing, misspellings, and order changes. Yet, these works overlook how diverse demographics uniquely formulate identical queries. For instance, older individuals tend to construct queries more naturally and in varied order compared to other groups. This demographic diversity necessitates enhancing the adaptability of ranking models to diverse query formulations. To this end, in this article, we propose a framework that integrates a novel rewriting pipeline that rewrites queries from various demographic perspectives and a novel framework to enhance ranking robustness. To be specific, we use Chain of Thought (CoT) technology to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents to emulate various demographic profiles, then use them for efficient query rewriting, and we innovate a Robust Multi-gate Mixture-of-Experts (R-MMoE) architecture coupled with a hybrid loss function, collectively strengthening the ranking models’ robustness. Our extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets assesses the efficacy of our query rewriting approach and the enhanced accuracy and robustness of the ranking model. The findings highlight the sophistication and effectiveness of our proposed model. We release our code implementation publicly ( https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/ROBR ).

To enhance the efficacy of multi-scenario services in industrial recommendation systems, the emergence of multi-domain recommendation has become prominent, which entails simultaneous modeling of all domains through a unified model, effectively capturing commonalities and differences among them. However, current methods rely on manual domain partitioning, which overlook the intricate domain relationships and the heterogeneity of different domains during joint optimization, hindering the integration of domain commonalities and differences. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a universal and flexible framework D3 aimed at optimizing the multi-domain recommendation pipeline from three key aspects. Firstly, an attention-based domain adaptation module is introduced to automatically identify and incorporate domain-sensitive features during training. Secondly, we propose a fusion gate module that enables the seamless integration of commonalities and diversities among domains, allowing for implicit characterization of intricate domain relationships. Lastly, we tackle the issue of joint optimization by deriving loss weights from two complementary viewpoints: domain complexity and domain specificity, alleviating inconsistencies among different domains during the training phase. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed framework. In addition, D3 has been implemented on a real-life, high-traffic internet platform catering to millions of users daily.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is a fundamental technique in recommendation and advertising systems. Recent studies have shown that implementing multi-scenario recommendations contributes to strengthening information sharing and improving overall performance. However, existing multi-scenario models only consider coarse-grained explicit scenario modeling that depends on pre-defined scenario identification from manual prior rules, which is biased and sub-optimal. To address these limitations, we propose a Scenario-Aware Hierarchical Dynamic Network for Multi-Scenario Recommendations (HierRec), which perceives implicit patterns adaptively, and conducts explicit and implicit scenario modeling jointly. In particular, HierRec designs a basic scenario-oriented module based on the dynamic weight to capture scenario-specific representations. Then the hierarchical explicit and implicit scenario-aware modules are proposed to model hybrid-grained scenario information, where the multi-head implicit modeling design contributes to perceiving distinctive patterns from different perspectives. Our experiments on two public datasets and real-world industrial applications on a mainstream online advertising platform demonstrate that HierRec outperforms existing models significantly. The implementation code is available for reproducibility.

Pengyue Jia, Yiding Liu, Xiangyu Zhao, Xiaopeng Li, Changying Hao, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Worldwide geolocalization aims to locate the precise location at the coordinate level of photos taken anywhere on the Earth. It is very challenging due to 1) the difficulty of capturing subtle location-aware visual semantics, and 2) the heterogeneous geographical distribution of image data. As a result, existing studies have clear limitations when scaled to a worldwide context. They may easily confuse distant images with similar visual contents, or cannot adapt to various locations worldwide with different amounts of relevant data. To resolve these limitations, we propose **G3**, a novel framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In particular, G3 consists of three steps, i.e., **G**eo-alignment, **G**eo-diversification, and **G**eo-verification to optimize both retrieval and generation phases of worldwide geolocalization. During Geo-alignment, our solution jointly learns expressive multi-modal representations for images, GPS and textual descriptions, which allows us to capture location-aware semantics for retrieving nearby images for a given query. During Geo-diversification, we leverage a prompt ensembling method that is robust to inconsistent retrieval performance for different image queries. Finally, we combine both retrieved and generated GPS candidates in Geo-verification for location prediction. Experiments on two well-established datasets IM2GPS3k and YFCC4k verify the superiority of G3 compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available online [https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/G3](https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/G3) for reproduction.

Multi-Domain Recommendation (MDR) has gained significant attention in recent years, which leverages data from multiple domains to enhance their performance concurrently. However, current MDR models are confronted with two limitations. Firstly, the majority of these models adopt an approach that explicitly shares parameters between domains, leading to mutual interference among them. Secondly, due to the distribution differences among domains, the utilization of static parameters in existing methods limits their flexibility to adapt to diverse domains. To address these challenges, we propose a novel model HAMUR. Specifically, HAMUR consists of two components: (1). Domain-specific adapter, designed as a pluggable module that can be seamlessly integrated into various existing multi-domain backbone models, and (2). Domain-shared hyper-network, which implicitly captures shared information among domains and dynamically generates the parameters for the adapter. We conduct extensive experiments on two public datasets using various backbone networks. The experimental results validate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed model.