Recommendation
-
Multi-Modal Semantic Expansion with Constrained LLM Reranking for Conversational Music Recommendation
2026-08-24 16:48:50Naman Garg, Sarika Jain, George FazekasAbstract
We present Team Semiintelligencn's solution for the ACM RecSys 2026 TalkPlayData Challenge, addressing conversational music recommendation through a multi-modal and personalized conversational recommender system. Our submitted system employs a three-stage pipeline: (1) multi-modal retrieval constructing decay-weighted centroids across seven dense embedding spaces - track- and user-level CF-BPR, Qwen3 (metadata, lyrics, attributes), CLAP audio, and SigLIP visual - supplemented by BM25 lexical retrieval and an artist substring-match signal, all fused via weighted Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) with optimized signal weights; (2) lightweight reranking (history filtering, popularity smoothing, and catalog diversity penalization); and (3) persona-diversified response generation using GPT-4o-mini. Beyond this submitted configuration, we report development-time experiments with additional components - constrained LLM-guided artist injection, album continuation signals, XGBoost LambdaMART, and a superior GPT-4.1 response prompt - that were not deployed to Blind B due to cost and complexity constraints. We optimize RRF weights on a 500-session development split via differential evolution, improving MRR by +19.5%. On Blind A, we observe that unconstrained LLM-guided injection across 54 sessions causes catastrophic nDCG regression (-18.9%), while conservative injection on only 9 sessions yields the best observed Blind A nDCG - a finding we present as a Blind A observation warranting further validation. The submitted system achieves a Blind B composite score of 0.3213.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23484
PDF
-
A Comprehensive Analysis of Arabic Natural Language Processing Research: Trends, Topic Evolution, and Research Gaps -- A Bibliometric and Topic-Based Study
2026-08-24 16:02:15Mullosharaf K. ArabovAbstract
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has grown rapidly over the past decade, driven by digital transformation in the Arab world, social media, and large language models (LLMs). Despite this growth, a comprehensive quantitative meta-analysis of the field remains absent. This study presents a large-scale bibliometric and topic-based analysis of 7,120 Arabic NLP papers published between 1960 and 2026, sourced from six collections. We employ BERTopic for topic modeling, regression analysis to identify citation predictors, social network analysis for co-authorship structures, and geographic mapping. Our findings show a significant publication surge after 2020, driven by transformer models and LLMs. Topic modeling identifies 19 substantive themes, the largest centered on text, speech, translation, and recognition. Citation analysis reveals a positive correlation between paper age and citations (r = 0.245, p < 0.001); regression shows that indexing in OpenAlex or Semantic Scholar and institutional affiliation are associated with higher citation counts. Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Egypt lead in research output. A task-dialect gap matrix identifies critical understudied areas, including summarization for Maghrebi, Iraqi, and Sudanese dialects. The largest topic has the highest H-index (87), followed by sentiment analysis (54). Our quantitative approach complements existing qualitative surveys and offers recommendations to prioritize under-resourced dialects and develop culturally aligned benchmarks for Arabic NLP.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23421
PDF
-
Adaptive Item-based Collaborative Structures via Noise Rescheduling in Diffusion for Generative Recommendation
2026-08-24 15:47:35Jiaqi Wang, Tianying Liu, Heng Chang, Jihong Guan, Wengen Li, Shuigeng ZhouAbstract
Discrete Diffusion Models (DDMs) have recently been introduced to recommendation systems, modeling user history as a token generation process via iterative denoising. However, while effective at capturing user-level sequential patterns, these methods often fail to explicitly integrate item-based collaborative filtering information, a critical component for accurate recommendation. This deficiency manifests in two key aspects: (1) the item representation is often semantic-focused, lacking collaborative priors for diffusion training; and (2) the denoising process employs a uniform noise schedule, treating all tokens indiscriminately and ignoring item-level adaptive structural dependencies. To bridge this gap, we propose ANR-DiffRec, a unified framework designed to encode item-based collaborative structures into discrete diffusion for generative recommendation. First, we explicitly incorporate an item co-occurrence matrix to guide semantic ID generation, providing a structured collaborative prior for discrete diffusion training. Second, we introduce an item-based adaptive noise rescheduling mechanism that dynamically adjusts denoising weights according to both local contextual recoverability and behavior-aware item dependencies. Specifically, the proposed strategy jointly models intra-item structural context and inter-item collaborative signals, enabling structure-aware denoising during diffusion training. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative recommendation models. Code: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23400
PDF
-
Expectations and Practices around AI Disclosure in CS Research
Abstract
As generative AI tools find increasing use in research workflows, ongoing debates on their impact, appropriateness and responsible use have led policymakers to enact policies to disclose AI use at multiple publishing venues. However, are current AI disclosure policies and practices reflective of their purpose? In this work, we first investigate disclosure policies of top computer science venues and find that despite their prevalence, they remain highly under-specified. Secondly, through a survey of computer science researchers (N=$109$), we characterize the necessity of disclosures across different research tasks and levels of human involvement. We learn that researchers find disclosures most necessary for tasks involving research design, and for tasks when the human involvement is low. We also compile expectations that researchers have about the information to be conveyed in AI disclosure statements. Lastly, through an analysis of $13867$ disclosure statements from EMNLP $2025$ and ICLR $2026$, we reveal a large disconnect between these expectations and AI disclosures in practice---a prime example being writing assistance which is deemed less necessary but frequently disclosed. We conclude with recommendations for authors and policymakers that seek to align AI disclosure policies and practices with expectations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23271
PDF
-
SA-RSQ: A Versatile Sparse Representation Framework for Multi-modal Recommender Systems
2026-08-24 08:39:36Xiang Wang, Shigang Quan, Tingzhen Chang, Kang Yang, Sitong Chen, Yabo Fan, Xingxing Wang, Zhaodian HeAbstract
Deploying high-dimensional multimodal features in industrial recommender systems incurs substantial storage and latency overhead. Hard quantization is compact but introduces boundary distortion, whereas dense soft quantization couples representation quality to the limited storage budget. We propose Sparse Activation-based Residual Soft Quantization (SA-RSQ), which uses Top-K sparse routing and softmax weights to store compact (Index, Probability) tuples. The stored tuples decouple per-item storage from codebook dimensionality; for a fixed selected support, gradients propagate through the routing weights and weighted reconstruction without relying on a straight-through estimator. Experiments on a proprietary food-delivery advertising dataset show favorable reconstruction-performance and CTR trade-offs across storage budgets of 8-48 bytes per item. A preliminary Next-Distribution Prediction study and a one-week online A/B test further demonstrate the practical potential of SA-RSQ, with relative lifts of +2.51% in CTR and +3.66% in CPM.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22979
PDF
-
Beyond Observed Auxiliary Relations: Environment-Conditioned Modeling for Multi-Behavior Recommendation
2026-08-24 07:56:56Seunghan Lee, Hyunsik Yoo, Jian Kang, Susik Yoon, SeongKu KangAbstract
Multi-behavior recommendation (MBR) leverages auxiliary behavioral signals, such as clicks and add-to-cart, to enhance target behavior prediction like purchases. While recent graph neural network-based approaches have achieved strong performance by systematically propagating auxiliary behavior signals, they still suffer from two fundamental challenges inherent to auxiliary behaviors: (1) missing auxiliary signals, which hinder generalization to items without auxiliary observations, and (2) unreliable auxiliary signals, which amplify noise misaligned with the target behavior. To address these challenges in a unified manner, we propose BOAR, an environment-conditioned MBR framework that addresses missing and unreliable auxiliary signals through two complementary modules conditioned on auxiliary observability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BOAR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 7.82% gains in HR@10 overall and up to 44.2% gains for target items without auxiliary observations, highlighting its ability to capture hidden preferences beyond observed auxiliary relations. Our code is available at: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22920
PDF
-
TSWAP: A Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Thai Wellness Advisor
2026-08-24 07:54:07Pornthep Ukosaramig, Kobkrit ViriyayudhakornAbstract
We present TSWAP, a deployed eight-language conversational wellness advisor grounded, via retrieval-augmented generation, in a verified knowledge base of Thai traditional medicine and certified wellness providers. An unmodified open-weight LLM (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on vLLM) is grounded on a ~30.6K-chunk Thai index by a hybrid dense-sparse retriever with cross-encoder reranking; a first-turn query classifier forces tool-based retrieval for entity lookups; a rule-based safety layer enforces medical scope and Thai emergency routing; and all eight languages are served zero-shot with translate-then-retrieve. We release the first Thai traditional-medicine/wellness retrieval benchmark (50 questions with gold document IDs; Recall@5 = 0.88), production QA logs (91.1% test-retest pass over 259 cases), and a 71-question frontier no-retrieval probe showing what each grounding pillar contributes: without the safety prompt the backend model family produced a full drug-dosing schedule and complied with out-of-scope requests, and without the knowledge base it produced zero verifiable provider recommendations. We further report two transferable deployment findings: English-calibrated 4-bit AWQ quantization corrupts Thai tone marks, and forced-retrieval routing is necessary for reliable grounding.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22917
PDF
-
Evaluating Inference-Time Defenses Against Package Hallucination in LLM-Generated Code
2026-08-23 23:17:56Alberick Euraste Djire, Iyiola E. Olatunji, Melissa Tessa, Earl T. Barr, Jacques Klein, Tegawend\'e F. Bissyand\'eAbstract
LLMs are increasingly used for code generation, yet they frequently hallucinate non-existent software packages, creating exploitable entry points into the software supply chain. We make four contributions to this problem. First, we show that prior evaluation methodologies systematically inflate hallucination rates by misclassifying standard-library modules as hallucinations in some languages. For Python, the overestimation reaches 9.4 percentage points. Second, we evaluate seven inference-time defenses for mitigating package hallucinations, including five guided decoding strategies (Greedy, Contrastive, DoLa, Nudging, and Active Layer-Contrastive Decoding), an iterative self-refinement approach (Self-Refine), and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based defense.. Across eight models spanning five families and four programming languages (Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Rust), RAG reduces the package hallucination rate (PHR) in 18 of 32 model--language configurations. Third, we introduce Package Utility (PU) to assess whether defenses preserve valid and task-relevant recommendations. Among strategies evaluated, Greedy decoding provides the strongest average mitigation--utility trade-off. Fourth, we stress-test all strategies under adversarial prompts seeded with fabricated package names and find that PHR surges by up to 45 percentage points relative to standard prompts, with Ruby consistently the most vulnerable language (80.9--95.2\%). Under adversarial conditions, RAG and Self-Refine outperform all decoding-only strategies, indicating that robust defense requires either external grounding or iterative self-verification when prompts are actively hostile. Our results recast package hallucination as both a measurement problem and a decoding-time control problem, and they demonstrate that the choice of defense must be matched to the threat model and recommendation utility.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22652
PDF
-
Task-Driven 3D Printability Assistance via Geometry- and Knowledge-Grounded LLM Reasoning
2026-08-22 22:56:29Zhaoda Du, Qiaojie Zheng, Xiaoli ZhangAbstract
Printability assessment in additive manufacturing is typically conducted at the geometry level before printing to determine whether a computer-aided design (CAD) model or stereolithography (STL) file can be successfully fabricated. Task suitability, in contrast, is usually evaluated after printing to determine whether the fabricated part satisfies the requirements of its intended use. As a result, for non-expert users to print functional parts, unsuitable material or process choices may only be identified after fabrication, leading to repeated printing, material waste, and user frustration. To address this challenge, this paper leverages the reasoning and language-understanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs), while grounding the reasoning with geometry evidence and structured material/printer knowledge to generate reliable pre-print recommendations. Given a stereolithography (STL) model and a natural-language task description, the framework generates a structured recommendation covering printability, material choice, process parameters, design guidance, risks, and explanations. We evaluate the framework on focused STL benchmark scenarios with novice-style task descriptions. The proposed method achieves 75.0% printability over 96 physical validation trials, with 88.9% task suitability among successfully printed samples. It also improves Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite material-selection accuracy from 37.5% under pure LLM to 90.0%. Expert evaluation further shows improved report quality, while post-print feedback improves recommendations on selected problematic cases. These results suggest that user task intent, geometry evidence, and structured material knowledge are all important for reliable task-driven printability assistance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22128
PDF
-
Development and Feasibility Evaluation of an Edge AI as Medical Device System for Breast Cancer Multidisciplinary Team Meetings
2026-08-22 21:20:51Aarzoo Dhiman, Farzana Haque, Kartikae Grover, Lydia Brian Smith, William Stephen JonesAbstract
Breast Cancer Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) meetings manage increasingly complex cases under considerable time pressure, and documentation requirements can reduce clinical efficiency and decision quality. Existing AI based MDT workflows rely on cloud-based processing, limiting their use because patient discussions contain identifiable information. We developed a fully on-device AI pipeline using open-source Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Large Language Models (LLMs) that transcribes breast cancer MDT discussions, structures clinical information, and generates treatment recommendations using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounded in National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance. The pipeline runs on a single NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, ensuring that patient audio, transcripts, and outputs remain within institutional infrastructure. Evaluation included two recorded simulated MDT discussions, ten clinically validated synthetic discussions, and 1,270 acoustically augmented recordings. Optimisation of Whisper large-v3 reduced word error rate by 20.7% and 24.4% on the recorded discussions and achieved performance within 0.58% WER and 1.58% word information lost of a commercial clinical ASR benchmark on augmented audio. MedGemma-RAG identified 2.3 times more MDT-concordant interventions than a proprietary cloud comparator (p = 0.020), with no significant difference in overall accuracy. Stakeholders identified automated documentation, treatment recommendation support, and case triage as the most credible near-term applications while highlighting workflow integration, governance, and clinician trust as key implementation challenges. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of privacy-preserving, fully on-device AI for MDT documentation and guideline-informed decision support, providing a foundation for prospective clinical evaluation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22108
PDF
-
LLM Agents Perform Controlled Experiments Using Simulation Models
2026-08-22 18:54:52Yuchen Xia, Michael Weyrich, Nasser Jazdi, Johannes St\"umpfle, Johannes Sigel, Akshay Narla, Gavin K. Reynolds, Anna Jawor-Baczynska, Pol LlopartAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in reasoning, planning, and tool use, but many scientific and engineering tasks require more than plausible text and code generation. They require understanding how a system responds to intervention, which in practice depends on controlled experimentation. In this work, we propose a multi-agent framework that enables LLM agents to conduct controlled experiments with scientific simulation models for pharmaceutical process design. Given a user query and a baseline configuration, the system constructs a structured task representation, designs experiments, executes comparative simulation, interprets the resulting outcomes, and synthesizes evidence-based recommendations for process parameter optimization. By coupling language models with high-fidelity simulation models in an interactive agent framework, the proposed system supports reasoning through intervention, comparison, and observation. As a result, it produces more specific and actionable outputs than language-only reasoning. In an industrial application setting, this advantage is reflected in higher output specificity as well as improved user-rated correctness and helpfulness. Ablation studies and visualized case analyses further demonstrate the effectiveness and practical utility of simulation-integrated experimental reasoning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23622
PDF
-
Decision-Support and Modeling with Large Language Models for Geothermal Well Arrays
2026-08-22 18:18:07Edwin Ouko, Emmanuel Lujan, Alan Edelman, Robert MetcalfeAbstract
Geothermal well arrays, which organize multiple geothermal wells into carefully planned geometric configurations, provide opportunities to enhance energy production capacity and increase fault tolerance. The development and adoption of these emerging geothermal technologies could be accelerated through the recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and high-level high-performance languages. A challenge in LLM-based applications is the reliability of the generated outputs, as they can be prone to subjective biases and hallucinations. This study assesses the potential of cutting-edge LLMs - such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and domain-specific models like AskGDR - as expert assistants that can synthesize insightful interpretations of complex geothermal data, as well as improve feature capabilities of geothermal models and numerical software. We developed a novel approach, leveraging Google's recently introduced AI assistant, NotebookLM, to accelerate the generation of unpublished quantitative geothermal benchmarks. The rapid generation of these evaluation instruments is essential for assessing the swiftly evolving capabilities of emerging language model technologies. In particular, we use these benchmarks and LLM-based interviews to analyze opportunities and limitations of two promising technologies: geothermal well arrays and closed-loop coaxial wells. Furthermore, we present a case study illustrating how LLMs can facilitate auto-parallelization of geothermal numerical models. Our analysis emphasizes their application in digital twins and underscores the importance of high-level, high-performance code generation. This line of research could play a transformative role in the geothermal sector by enabling the next-generation of decision-support applications, integrating data analysis, informed recommendations, and more dynamic numerical modeling workflows.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22068
PDF
-
Beyond Similarity: Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Multi-Objective Food Substitution in Charitable Food Agencies
2026-08-22 14:30:00Naimur Rahman Chowdhury, Limon Bin HossainAbstract
Charitable food agencies play an important role in alleviating food insecurity by distributing donated food to people in need. However, they rely on ad hoc in-kind donations and often face shortages of specific foods, so they offer substitutes. A good food substitution requires matching household preferences, nutritional needs, and item similarity. Agencies have limited direct records of consumption behavior due to resource constraints, making it challenging to make an appropriate substitution decision that meets multiple criteria. In this study, we propose a heterogeneous graph neural network (HeteroGNN), a source-grounded recommendation framework for food substitution in charitable food agencies. We first build a unified relational graph from large-scale public data sources, combining household behavior on food consumption and food nutrient information in the United States (US) context. We treat the substitution recommendation as a multi-objective ranking problem with three targets, including behavior affinity, health suitability, and substitution similarity. We train and validate the proposed framework under standard graph relationship and adverse cold-start settings by removing relational edges from the graph. Our results show that the proposed framework leverages relational information beyond node features in predicting consumption behavior. Additionally, the proposed framework remains robust with sparsity when the model receives incomplete information about behavior and nutrient features. Finally, we show the weak correlation among different objectives, thereby justifying the multi-objective framing as a replacement for an aggregated decision. The proposed framework can help downstream charitable agency decision-makers make contextspecific substitution recommendations with limited information available.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21979
PDF
-
AI Watchdog: Agent Interfaces for Detecting and Defending Against Manipulative Dark Patterns in AI Conversations
2026-08-22 08:24:17Rachel Poonsiriwong (Pub), Chayapatr (Pub), Archiwaranguprok, Constanze Albrecht, Monchai Lertsutthiwong, Pattie Maes, Pat PataranutapornAbstract
Conversational AI increasingly shapes consequential decisions, yet users have limited support for recognizing and resisting manipulation. We present AI Watchdog, a browser-based agent interface that monitors live conversations, detects five dark-pattern categories, including sycophancy, brand bias, anthropomorphization, sneaking, and harmful generation, and alerts users when they occur. Its open-weight turn-level classifier supports independent deployment and a path toward local inference, preserving user privacy while remaining separate from the conversational AI. We evaluated AI Watchdog in a preregistered, five-condition between-subjects experiment (N = 150) comparing a no-intervention control with four configurations varying nudge timing (prebunking vs. just-in-time) and engagement mode (without vs. with cognitive forcing). Results show that participants rarely flagged manipulative turns across all conditions, and post-task awareness did not differ significantly across groups. However, just-in-time warnings without cognitive forcing were the only intervention to significantly reduce compliance with AI-steered recommendations containing dark patterns, lowering compliance from 71.7% to 53.7%, an 18 percentage-point reduction. Exploratory analyses further showed that lower misinformation susceptibility was associated with greater flagging but not lower compliance, while higher AI trust was associated with greater compliance and lower reported awareness. Together, these findings suggest that explicit recognition of conversational dark patterns and behavioral resistance to AI steering may be distinct outcomes, motivating further investigation of timely, low-friction defensive interfaces.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21841
PDF
-
Why This, Not That? Mining User Profiles for Pair-wise Counterfactuals
2026-08-21 22:11:11Meysam Varasteh, Veronika Bogina, Noam Koenigstein, Robin BurkeAbstract
The topic of explanation in recommender systems has seen steady research attention since the earliest days of the field. With some exceptions, this work has focused on the explanation of single items in a recommendation list and, especially recently, has emphasized approaches that are decoupled from the logic of the recommendation algorithm itself. Based on findings in the psychology of interpersonal communication, we propose a new task, pairwise interpretation of item rankings, asking the comparative question ``Why is item A ranked higher than item B?''. An effective solution to this task, we argue, is inherently grounded in the operation of the recommendation algorithm. We propose a class of techniques based on counterfactual learning to uncover the items in a user's profile that have contributed to the relative ranking of items. Using multiple datasets, we show that it is possible to identify such items as potential basis for comparative explanation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21662
PDF
-
Power-Performance Characterization of TinyML Systems
2026-08-21 21:34:24Yujie Zhang, Dhananjaya Wijerathne, Zhaoying Li, Tulika MitraAbstract
TinyML systems are enabling machine learning (ML) inference at the edge. However, there is little quantitative analysis of such systems. This paper presents a systematic performance and power characterization of diverse TinyML applications on microcontrollers (MCUs), spanning neural network models, software libraries, operating systems, and hardware architectures. We focus on the impact of the multiple layers of abstraction that provide higher programmability at the expense of performance and energy efficiency. We propose a model to estimate the costs of different abstraction layers and make recommendations for minimizing those costs. Our findings can help designers with Neural Architecture Search (NAS) and CNN inference optimization on edge devices.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21646
PDF
-
Adapting Knowledge Graphs for Behavior Denoising in Sequential Recommendation
2026-08-21 15:54:39Zichun Jin, Zihan Zhou, Yinan Liu, Bin Wang, Xiaochun YangAbstract
Sequential recommendation predicts the next item from a user's interaction history, but not every interaction is equally informative. Real logs combine persistent preferences with temporary needs, exploration, and incidental behavior, so some interactions can distort history representations or provide unreliable supervision. Existing denoising methods judge such interactions mainly from co-occurrence, order, or model predictions, without explicit evidence from relations between items. Knowledge graphs (KGs) offer this evidence, but item popularity, graph degree, uneven coverage, and widely shared entities can inflate connectivity and bias reliability estimates. Here we present AdaptedKG, which derives calibrated KG evidence for each training example without adding graph representations to the recommendation model. It first compares the observed context with structurally matched alternatives to identify relational paths that are unusually prominent and uses them to build a local KG view. It then compares each interaction with structurally matched reference items to calibrate its support within that view. The resulting retention coefficients gate historical representations and reweight target losses. All sample-specific scores are computed offline using training interactions and a fixed KG, so the backbone remains unchanged and no KG access is required at inference. Experiments show gains with a standard sequential recommender and multiple behavior-denoising sequential recommenders.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21243
PDF
-
PromptResponse: Optimizing Prompts for LLM Coding Tasks
2026-08-21 13:16:48Erik Thureck, Robert K\"uhnen, Tim JacobowitzAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in research workflows and software development pipelines, yet their output remains sensitive to input prompt variations. This paper presents $\unicode{x00AB}$PromptResponse$\unicode{x00BB}$, a controlled study examining how formatting and LLM-based tuning of coding task prompts affect the resulting code's performance, efficiency, and stability. Using five semantically identical yet syntactically distinct variants of the HumanEval dataset$\unicode{x2014}$baseline, JSON, Markdown, YAML, and an LLM-tuned version$\unicode{x2014}$we had GPT-4o solve its coding problems over 8200$\unicode{x00A0}$executions. Our results show that consistent formatting$\unicode{x2014}$especially JSON$\unicode{x2014}$improves generation efficiency and syntactic stability, with minor gains in task performance. Conversely, the LLM-tuned prompts resulted in significantly degraded task performance without significant improvements in any other dimension. These findings suggest that low-effort reformatting alone can yield measurable improvements, while tuning must account for model alignment. We conclude our work with providing a set of practical recommendations informed by our results as well as releasing our dataset variants and evaluation pipeline for future work.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21074
PDF
-
TRACE: Agentic Catalog Enrichment with Multi-source Evidence Grounding
2026-08-21 08:08:27Rohan Kumar, Steven Xu, Kyle MacDonald, Matthew Long, Bernice Chow, Mac VanRenterghem, Sudeep DasAbstract
Product catalogs underpin search, discovery, and recommendation in e-commerce, yet they are often attribute-sparse: the attributes shoppers and downstream systems rely on are either buried in unstructured content such as titles and images or missing from the catalog altogether. Manually enriching e-commerce catalogs is impractical given their scale and rapid growth. This paper introduces TRACE, a novel framework for automated catalog attribute enrichment using agentic Large Language Models (LLMs). A ScoutAgent triangulates multimodal evidence across merchant catalogs, syndicated feeds, and identity-matched web search to propose candidate attribute values with supporting evidence, while a JudgeAgent verifies the proposed value for each attribute value against its supporting evidence and decides whether to publish it or route it to human review. On an offline human evaluation dataset, TRACE's proposed attribute values were 98.2% accurate at 74.7% attribute coverage. Deployed in production on an industry-scale catalog, TRACE increased impression-weighted enrichment coverage across four business verticals by 90.4%. An online experiment subsequently showed that surfacing the enriched attributes on the product detail page increased checkout conversion by 0.48%.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20844
PDF
-
Profiling What Matters: Context-Aware Item Profiles from Large-Scale Metadata for LLM Recommenders
2026-08-21 07:20:06Dojun Hwang, Seunghan Lee, Cheonyoung Park, Sara Yu, SeongKu KangAbstract
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced reranking in recommendation, effectively leveraging item-side information remains challenging. Real-world items are described by vast, heterogeneous, and unstructured metadata, where decision-relevant signals are often implicit, noisy, or buried in long descriptions. Moreover, feature salience is highly context-dependent, varying not only across items but also across users. Existing methods often rely on item titles, fixed attributes, or static item summaries, which limit personalized and fine-grained item understanding. To bridge this gap, we propose CAIRO, a user context-aware item profiling framework for LLM-based reranking. CAIRO first structures raw metadata and reviews into objective features and subjective traits, and employs a lightweight profiler to select the most relevant information for each user-item pair with limited serving-time overhead. The resulting profiles are concise and context-specific, providing relevant item-side evidence for the LLM's ranking decision. Experiments show that CAIRO consistently improves LLM-based reranking, highlighting the importance of item profiling that effectively exploits vast item-side information.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20801
PDF
