Recommendation
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Beyond Effectiveness: A Multi-Criteria Framework for Comparing Practical Socio-Technical Interventions
2026-08-21 01:03:12Catherine King, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Kathleen M. CarleyAbstract
Designers and policymakers in sociotechnical domains like content moderation, privacy interfaces, recommender systems and beyond, must choose among a growing menu of proposed interventions, but typically lack a principled basis for comparing them. Prior work tends to evaluate interventions individually and mostly along the effectiveness criteria, while implementation constraints such as cost, effort and feasibility are often considered separately. We present a multi-criteria framework for evaluating sociotechnical interventions. This framework is instantiated through the case of misinformation, a domain of intense focus for proposed countermeasures. We survey $N=39$ researchers on 40 operationalized interventions across five evaluative criteria: political feasibility, effectiveness, user acceptance, cost, and implementation effort. We find that the interventions that experts judge to be the most effective are not always the most acceptable to the public or the most feasible to implement. We also discuss how this tension has implications for the design of sociotechnical interventions beyond misinformation, and offer a decision framework for practitioners navigating the trade-offs of sociotechnical interventions.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20649
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One Hierarchy, Two Systems: Semantic Product IDs for Discovery-Surface Ranking and Search-Page Query Reformulation
2026-08-21 00:27:32Steven Xu, Sanjyot Thete, Saathvik Dirisala, Raghav Saboo, Nimesh Sinha, Leo Shao, Elyse Winer, Sudeep Das, Martin Wang, Kyle MacDonaldAbstract
Multi-merchant e-commerce catalogs contain equivalent and related products under different merchant-scoped identifiers, fragmenting behavioral evidence across merchants. Expert-defined taxonomies, meanwhile, are often too coarse for fine-grained discovery. We investigate whether a single hierarchical Semantic ID (\sid{}) representation can support personalized ranking and query reformulation. Learned once from product-content embeddings, the hierarchy defines product concepts at multiple granularities that each application combines with its own behavioral and serving context. For ranking, we aggregate consumer affinity and product performance over \sid{} prefixes and derive sequence features for candidate products and consumer histories. Controlled ablations show improved offline relevance, while online evaluation of the full ranking treatment shows stronger top-slot add-to-cart engagement and broader exposure for less-popular products. For query reformulation, we ground queries and session transitions in \sid{} concepts, use the hierarchy for navigation and refinement, and filter suggestions against the merchant's assortment. Offline evaluation shows finer intent preservation than taxonomy and higher-quality suggestions than raw query-string transitions; online evaluation shows reduced search effort and earlier access to purchasable products. These results show that a shared semantic product hierarchy can support both recommendation and search while preserving the task-specific context required by each application.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20640
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Difficulty-Aware Semantic-ID Optimization for Generative Recommendation
2026-08-20 23:20:36Xin Yu, Stephen Li, Sina Aghaei, Zifan Zhu, Jiamu Bai, Guanjie Huang, Bo Peng, Yiyao Liu, Lingzhou XueAbstract
Semantic-ID-based generative recommendation casts retrieval and ranking as autoregressive generation over hierarchical item identifiers. A common recipe is SFT followed by GRPO, yet vanilla GRPO is poorly matched to this tree-structured task. Under the frozen SFT checkpoint, the exact target is absent from the first 16 candidates of the 50-beam constrained ranking for many prompts, and in harder cases none of these candidates enters the target SID branch. This prompt-level diagnostic motivates a training concern: when on-policy GRPO groups are similarly target-missing, item-level rewards may produce weak or degenerate reward variation even if some candidates follow part of the target path. We propose Difficulty-Aware Semantic-ID Optimization (DASO), a tree-aware post-training method that addresses this failure mode as an online rollout-allocation problem. Instead of using fixed difficulty buckets or uniformly injecting ground-truth completions, DASO profiles each current rollout group by prefix-match depth, locates the bottleneck SID levels where candidates leave the target path, and reallocates a bounded portion of the group to prefix-guided completions while retaining raw rollouts for contrast. A SID-prefix reward provides graded credit, while an auxiliary SFT anchor mitigates regression on examples already solved by the SFT checkpoint. On the public benchmarks, DASO improves over MiniOneRec-style GRPO on 11 of 12 metrics and achieves the best result on 9 of 12 metrics; it also improves most level-wise recall metrics on the internal recommendation task.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20611
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Designing Human-mediated AI Guidance: Ready Together for Personalized Family Emergency Preparedness
2026-08-20 12:17:24Nini Kurashvili, Yana Ivanchenko, Greta Schiavo, Cansu Koyuturk, Dimitri OgnibeneAbstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly used across domains to provide personalized information, recommendations, and decision support. However, in some contexts, AI-generated information may not be suitable for direct delivery to the final recipient. Instead, it may need to be interpreted, adapted, and communicated by a human who understands the recipient's needs, emotional state, and situational context. Human-AI interaction research has given less attention to situations in which a more knowledgeable human acts as an intermediary between an AI system and a less experienced or less informed recipient. We introduce the human-mediated AI guidance framework and explore it through Ready Together, an AI-supported family emergency preparedness system in which parents mediate AI-generated content for their children. The system is designed to provide personalized guidance and support parents in making emergency preparedness more interactive and understandable through guided activities and family-centered learning. The system design was informed by a qualitative, design-oriented research process involving semi-structured interviews and co-design activities. Findings identified challenges in family emergency preparedness, including difficulty discussing emergencies with children, uncertainty about providing appropriate explanations, and a preference for interactive learning activities. These findings informed the design of an interactive prototype, subsequently evaluated through a pilot study and a heuristic evaluation. Participants responded positively to the personalized recommendations and practical activities. Preliminary findings suggest that human-mediated AI guidance may support context-sensitive family preparedness while preserving parents' responsibility for interpreting, adapting, and communicating AI-generated information.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19950
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PACEShop: Evaluating Personalized, Actionable, Compositional, and Evidence-grounded Shopping Assistants
2026-08-20 01:21:51Weimin Lyu, Chen Luo, Guangrui Li, Yaochen Xie, Dhineshkumar Ramasubbu, Arief Koesdwiady, Wanqiu Long, Hansu Gu, Yutong Chen, Zheshen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yi LiuAbstract
Shopping assistants are shifting from ranked product lists toward structured decision support, where systems must synthesize shopper context, product evidence, and next-step guidance into a coherent recommendation experience. This changes the unit of evaluation: a fluent response can still fail by ignoring shopper context, contradicting itself across components, or leaving defects too vague to localize. Existing personalization, grounding, and LLM-as-a-judge benchmarks cover pieces of this problem, but they do not define a joint evaluation target for structured shopping-assistant responses. We formulate this missing evaluation target as PACE: Personalized, Actionable, Compositional, and Evidence-grounded evaluation. We instantiate PACE with two artifacts: PACEShop, a benchmark dataset that makes the target measurable through 22,625 controlled records with structured personas, auditable evidence pools, GOOD/BAD labels, and gold defect family and location annotations; and PACEJudge, a training-free judging protocol that makes the target reportable through a structured output contract. Our experiments show that generic judges can recognize broad quality but fail to recover the diagnostic fields required for PACE; PACEShop makes these failures verifiable, and PACEJudge improves persona-source, cross-component, grounding, and family/location closure without retraining, showing that realistic shopping-assistant evaluation requires a task-matched output contract rather than only a stronger backbone or scalar prompt.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26180
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When Machines Speak: A Unified Generative Framework for Integrating Machine-Native Symbols into Pretrained Large Language Models
2026-08-20 00:54:36Su Yan, Rakesh IyerAbstract
Many real-world AI systems represent entities, behaviors, and structured information using discrete machine-native symbols rather than natural language. While these representations are compact and preserve task-relevant structure, they lie outside the linguistic token space of pretrained large language models (LLMs), creating a fundamental divide between language modeling and structured prediction. We introduce UniLang, a unified generative framework that bridges this divide by extending pretrained LLMs to treat machine-native symbols as first-class generative units alongside natural-language tokens. UniLang expands the LLM's vocabulary and embedding space with grounded machine-native representations, enabling textual and symbolic tokens to be jointly modeled and generated under a single autoregressive objective. This unified interface allows pretrained LLMs to directly operate on machine-native representations without requiring them to be verbalized as natural language or relying on task-specific architectures. We evaluate UniLang on two structurally distinct tasks, sequential recommendation and legal precedent prediction, spanning different domains and types of structured prediction. Across both tasks, UniLang consistently outperforms strong baselines, demonstrating a path toward extending pretrained LLMs beyond language and using them as a common generative modeling backbone for heterogeneous machine-native representations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19529
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Leaf Values as Coordinates: Exact Contrastive Explanation for Gradient-Boosted Ensembles
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A gradient-boosted ensemble predicts by summing one leaf value per tree. Read those values as coordinates rather than as intermediate results, and every instance becomes a point in R^M on which the model acts linearly: the score is the sum of the coordinates. This small change of view makes contrastive explanation exact. The difference between two instances is a vector that is identically zero wherever they share a leaf, so the gap between a rejected applicant and an accepted one is carried by a handful of coordinates, each traceable to a real split in a real tree. Nothing is fitted, sampled, or assumed additive in features -- the additivity is already there, in the right space. We build a recourse method on this representation and evaluate it on five tabular datasets under repeated cross-validation. Its recommendation reconstructs the model's own decision to 6.2 x 10^-15, so an auditor can re-check the arithmetic without the model. On the credit datasets it is Pareto-non-dominated on effort against realism. And when recommendations are restricted to changes the subject could actually make -- not their age, not a settled delinquency -- it retains 58% of its validity where the strongest baseline retains 41%, a distinction the standard evaluation cannot see because it never asks whether a recommendation can be carried out.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19127
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rEDMRec: Distilling Large Language Model Reasoning into an Editable Experience Memory for Recommendation
2026-08-19 14:17:34Minh Hoang Nguyen, Tung Le, Huy Tien NguyenAbstract
Large language models can improve recommendation quality by reasoning explicitly over user history and candidate items - for example, extracting a user's preferences or explaining why one item fits better than another - rather than mapping history directly to a ranked list. This reasoning, however, is expensive to repeat on every ranking request and, once produced, is typically consumed once and discarded, leaving it neither reusable across future requests nor easy to inspect or correct as user tastes drift. Our insight is that reasoning does not need to be regenerated at every call if it can instead be compressed once into a compact, structured memory that a lightweight model retrieves from. We propose rEDMRec, which distills a teacher LLM's reasoning into four typed, editable experience channels - long-term preference, short-term context, item-perception, and counterfactual hard-negative comparisons - maintained by an LLM memory controller that performs Add/Delete/Modify/Keep operations and refines entries via K-agent debate. A lightweight student LLM then ranks candidates purely by retrieving from this memory, without invoking the teacher again, decoupling online inference cost from reasoning depth. Across ML-1M, Amazon Beauty, and Steam and ten student backbones, rEDMRec improves HR@1 over zero-shot, few-shot, and RAG on every backbone, and over GraphRAG on most backbones, with Impv up to 13.3% vs. the second-best baseline on ML-1M. Channel ablations show that short-term context is the only channel that helps consistently across capacity tiers, whereas long-term, item-perception, and counterfactual contributions are capacity-dependent (and can reverse on the strongest students); debate-based memory optimization lowers bank duplication by 7.4 percentage points while raising downstream HR@1 by up to +0.029 over six optimization epochs.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18952
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SIDScope: A Diagnostic Resource for Semantic-ID Interfaces in Generative Recommendation
2026-08-19 10:35:12Jiandong Ding, Huijie Qin, Tiandeng Wu, Yi CaoAbstract
Semantic-ID mappings are reusable interfaces between item tokenizers and generative recommenders, yet released mappings rarely state whether they are coherent, what structure they expose, how generated paths resolve, or what must be revalidated after a refresh. SIDScope is a source-traced diagnostic resource for these decisions. It normalizes item-to-code artifacts, verifies provenance and joins, profiles mapping structure, compares paired revisions, and accounts for path-to-item outcomes in generated traces. Across nine source-traced tokenizer exports from seven families on Amazon and Yelp data - eight executable routes plus one auditable snapshot - SIDScope reveals that interface health is multi-signal rather than scalar. Its central finding is mechanism-conditional: prefix alignment strongly tracks held-out candidate exposure when retrieval consumes SID prefixes, then weakens as scoring becomes prefix-independent. Trained trace accounting exposes a second hidden gap: a valid target path can survive without uniquely retrieving the target item by 1.2-3.0 percentage points. A refresh case establishes a third: repairing the mapping does not by itself restore an inherited generator; model reuse requires a separate handoff check. The package provides frozen evidence summaries, conformance reports, trace labels, table builders, and CPU-only verifiers. It supports decisions about artifact readiness, interface risks, and revalidation before model reuse.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18779
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Budget-First Tariff Recommendation : A Complete Algorithmic Framework for Telecom Plan Recommendation without Overcharging
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Telecom operators traditionally offer predefined tariff grids, forcing users to choose from a limited set of plans. This paper proposes BFTR (Budget-First Tariff Recommendation), a complete algorithmic framework integrating eight Budget-First strategies, including two original hybrid approaches: Recursive Hybrid (conditional interpolation) and Knapsack-First Hybrid (priority knapsack). Unlike existing approaches that adjust prices upward to guarantee a minimum margin, BFTR guarantees the absence of overcharging by systematically aligning the final price with the catalog reference price. We mathematically formalize each strategy, prove the existence of an offer for any positive budget, and prove that the price deviation (surcharge) is zero for all strategies that do not use interpolation with correction. A detailed comparative analysis confronts BFTR to ten main existing tariff models on ten dimensions. Experiments on a dataset of 974 customers inspired by the Nigerian MTN market show that: (i) Recursive Hybrid is optimal for the customer (100% budget used, 29.9 GB volume, utility 0.946, 0% overcharging), (ii) Piecewise offers the highest volume (39.7 GB) with 0% overcharging, (iii) Power Law provides an excellent compromise (99.9% budget, 38.1 GB, 0% overcharging). All strategies achieve a zero surcharge, confirming the theoretical guarantees. A sensitivity analysis on the weighting parameter alpha (0.2 - volume priority, 0.5 - balance, 0.8 - budget priority) shows that utility rankings evolve logically. Execution times (< 10 ms) and very low failure rates (0% for robust strategies) confirm the operational viability of the system. The formal proof of the absence of overcharging constitutes a major theoretical contribution.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18723
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Bridging Search and CRM: Productionizing AI Product Research Agents for Customer Re-Engagement
2026-08-19 05:01:37Mandar Kulkarni, Pooja A., Samir ShahAbstract
Modern e-commerce platforms often operate search, recommendation, personalization, and CRM systems independently, limiting opportunities for proactive customer re-engagement. This is particularly challenging for exploratory intents such as best smartphones or latest 5G phones, where users may leave the platform for external research before purchasing. We present a scalable, production-deployed framework that bridges search and CRM workflows through AI-powered Product Research Agents. The system identifies users with exploratory purchase intent and low engagement, conducts grounded multi-agent product research using behavioral signals, external knowledge, and enterprise catalog data, and delivers personalized recommendations through WhatsApp. We evaluate the framework in a 23-day production deployment involving approximately 15K WhatsApp notifications for mobile product discovery. The campaign achieved substantial CTR improvements over traditional WhatsApp recommendation campaigns, with evidence of secondary engagement through message forwarding and sharing. The deployment also generated downstream purchases and GMV impact, demonstrating the practical effectiveness of AI Product Research Agents for proactive customer re-engagement and end-to-end customer journey optimization.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18543
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Pairwise Ranking Outperforms Single-Action RL for Offline Explanation Selection: A Practical Lesson
2026-08-19 04:29:04Tanay Chowdhury, Saeideh Shahrokh EsfahaniAbstract
Industrial explainable-recommendation systems built on LLMs incur a substantial serving cost: each request triggers an LLM generation, with latency in the hundreds of milliseconds and cost that scales linearly with traffic. We separate generation from selection: explanations are produced ahead of time as a frozen candidate pool (six prompt styles, two commodity LLMs), and a small CPU-resident selector picks one at request time. The stack needs no GPU and returns in under 100 ms. Our primary benchmark is a 2,958-pair XRec Google Local subset, evaluating six offline-pool selectors (LambdaRank, PPO, GRPO, DPO, teacher-student distillation) and three KG-path selectors (random walks, edge-disjoint enumeration, MMR-reranked paths). A 300-pair MovieLens-1M split with Claude-Sonnet-4.5 references serves as an internal cross-dataset check, since no public benchmark exists for this setting. All variants use the same BERTScore-F1 protocol as XRec and G-Refer, averaged across five seeds. LambdaRank reaches F1 = 0.500 on Google Local, exceeding both G-Refer and XRec, and F1 = 0.329 on the MovieLens-1M check. With seed variance below 0.003 F1, the ordering is reliable: pairwise learning-to-rank outperforms single-action RL (PPO, GRPO, DPO), which use only one labelled candidate per rollout, leaving K-1 labels unused. The KG-path family targets a different objective: all three variants reach USR = 1.000 on Google Local and 0.997-1.000 on MovieLens-1M, since per-request path grounding yields a unique output per query, avoiding template-collapse failures affecting cached-LLM outputs. A generator-pool study comparing Claude 3 Haiku and Claude Haiku 4.5 shows small F1 shifts (0.001-0.006) while preserving selector ranking: selector and generator can be evaluated independently, though absolute F1 depends on the generator. End-to-end build cost is near $15 on commodity hardware.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18531
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ERASE: EaRly bAckpropagation SchEdule for Faster Training of Modern Recommendation Systems
Abstract
Lightweight proxy models enable rapid experimentation without repeatedly training frontier-scale systems, but their small kernels often leave modern accelerators underutilized. Conventional training compounds this inefficiency by scheduling the forward and backward passes as disjoint phases, so spare capacity in one cannot be filled by work from the other. We reinterpret the detachment mechanism of Forward-Forward (FF) as a scheduling primitive: given a local objective, detaching a block's output removes downstream gradient dependencies, making its backward pass ready when its forward pass finishes. ERASE launches each detached subgraph's backward pass early on a separate CUDA stream, overlapping it with subsequent forward work. Execution trace on a lightweight transformer demonstrates this overlap and its limit: a kernel that saturates the device leaves no capacity for concurrency. On a large-scale click-through-rate model, detaching six dense subarchitectures improves training throughput by up to $9.51\%$ while keeping normalized entropy close to the baseline.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18469
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The Lifecycle of LLM-as-a-Judge for Large-Scale Recommendation Explanations
2026-08-18 20:27:09Emma Yanyang Kong, JJ Tan, Ishan Gupta, Lars Olds, Claire Campbell, David Fagnan, Veli Balin, Rohan Gosain, Louis Garcia, Minsu JangAbstract
LLM-as-a-Judge, which leverages a large language model to evaluate natural language generated by another AI application or model, has become a standard, scalable approach for accelerating and extending costly human evaluation. However, most work treats a judge as a static artifact, evaluating it once at construction or against a fixed benchmark. In contrast, we argue that an LLM judge running in a production system is better understood as having a lifecycle: it must be built, trained, deployed, and continuously maintained as the surrounding data evolves, and each phase poses distinct technical and operational challenges. We present such a lifecycle for the LLM judges that evaluate user-facing recommendation explanations at Netflix, where our pipeline generates and the judges assess hundreds of thousands of distinct show-level explanations per week, served across the mobile experience to millions of members. Our framework has four phases: (I) Birth, defining multiple evaluation criteria and building curated benchmark datasets with human labels and rationales; (II) Training, refining the judges' rubrics via Reasoning-Aligned Rubric Tuning (RART), a rubric-tuning procedure that uses a meta-judge over reasoning output as the learning signal; (III) Deployment, in which one judge serves two production roles: quality gating and reflective generation; and (IV) Monitoring, a continuous Human-in-the-Loop alignment process that detects drift and triggers re-tuning behind a human review gate. We report post-launch results from a five-week A/B test over tens of millions of members, in which the judge-aligned explanations shifted member viewing toward novel content (previously unwatched) and increased successful browse-to-play sessions relative to a no-explanation control, with no quality-related takedowns.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18300
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Delegation Asymmetry in Agentic Recommender Systems: Measuring Two-Sided Receptivity in Online Dating
2026-08-18 17:51:16Daria Leshchikova, Valentina V. Kuskova, Dmitry Zaytsev, Valerii KlimovAbstract
Autonomous LLM agents that converse on a user's behalf are an emerging design pattern in matching platforms, yet their viability depends on a condition rarely examined: users must accept not only delegating conversation to an agent, but also receiving agent-mediated communication from others. We study this condition using two large-scale surveys of active users of a major dating platform (N=2,894 on generative profile features; N=2,617 on autonomous conversational agents, fielded in two languages). We develop a latent-variable measurement model of agent receptivity based on graded response models with latent regression, and show via model comparison that willingness to send and willingness to receive agent communication are distinct constructs: highly correlated (rho=0.92) but separable (Delta BIC=52), with partial measurement invariance across languages. The model quantifies a systematic delegation asymmetry: deploying one's own agent requires far lower receptivity (threshold -0.38) than engaging a counterpart's agent (+0.32; full engagement +1.39), and mean deployment propensity exceeds engagement propensity roughly threefold. Under a random-pairing counterfactual derived from stated receptivity, only 4-13% of directed dyads combine agent deployment with receiver engagement, with a pronounced gender-directional imbalance. Design counterfactuals quantify the levers: a reciprocity requirement cuts interaction volume by half or more by excluding nearly two-thirds of would-be deployment, while routing agent contacts on receive receptivity triples per-contact engagement, a lift that survives out-of-sample validation with the target item held out (AUC 0.88, 3.1x quartile lift under respondent-level cross-validation). We discuss implications for agentic recommender design, including disclosure, opt-in mechanics, and receptivity-aware matchmaking.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18058
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From Student Risk Prediction to SC2R: Semantics-Constrained Counterfactual Recourse for Educational Decision Support
2026-08-18 10:33:21Ngoc Luyen Le, Marie-H\'el\`ene Abel, Bertrand LaforgeAbstract
Learning analytics models can identify students at risk of poor performance, but they do not directly indicate which interventions are feasible, actionable, and compatible with educational constraints. This paper introduces SC2R, a semantics-constrained counterfactual recourse framework for educational decision support. SC2R combines a calibrated predictive model, integer-programming-based recourse generation over discrete action variables, a lightweight RDF vocabulary for intervention-plan representation, and SHACL validation for enforcing timing, budget, immutability, and availability constraints. The framework is evaluated offline on the OULAD dataset using snapshots constructed relative to each assessment at two decision horizons. Results show that the predictive component provides strong performance, that compact intervention plans can be generated at scale, and that semantic validation reveals infeasible plans that lighter optimization-only settings would otherwise accept. Rather than claiming causal improvement in student outcomes, this work shows that counterfactual recourse becomes more operationally meaningful in education when recommendations are not only model-valid, but also semantically feasible and machine-checkable.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17618
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Can Large Language Models Identify Meaningful Touchpoints in Conversion Attribution?
2026-08-18 08:22:54Jinqi Wu, Sishuo Chen, Zhangming Chan, Yong Bai, Chao Yi, Han Zhu, Shuodian Yu, Lei Zhang, Sheng Chen, Chenghuan Hou, Jian Xu, Chaoyou FuAbstract
Touchpoint selection in conversion attribution, namely identifying meaningful touchpoints contributing to conversions, is essential for e-commerce recommendation and online advertising. Current selection methods rely heavily on collaborative-filtering-based heuristics, which fail to align with user-perceived semantic intent. Through human annotation, we reveal a significant semantic gap: many implicitly-related, semantically relevant touchpoints remain undetected by existing rules. Therefore, we systematically evaluate the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in identifying these hidden associations. Our evaluation shows that while LLMs effectively uncover a substantial portion of implicitly-related touchpoints, significant room for improvement remains in their selection performance. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of different prompting strategies and foundation model choices on identification performance, providing valuable insights into their reasoning patterns and effectiveness. These insights offer a new roadmap for transitioning conversion attribution from mechanical rule-matching to human-aligned semantic reasoning. Moreover, we leverage the LLM-attributed conversion labels for enhancing industrial CVR model training and achieve significant offline performance gains, showing the potential of LLMs in conversion attribution.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28649
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The Problem Is the Problem: Towards Scalable Mathematical Discovery
2026-08-17 17:19:59Zeyu Zheng, Shengtong Zhang, Jeremy Avigad, Prasad Tetali, Sean WelleckAbstract
AI systems are increasingly capable of contributing to mathematical research. In research practice, frontier-model reasoning is a limited resource, and expert mathematical review is even more sharply constrained. Allocating these scarce resources well is therefore central to making AI-assisted mathematical discovery efficient. In most current AI-for-math workflows, human effort is concentrated at the beginning and end, in selecting suitable research problems and later reviewing the resulting artifacts. These two stages are becoming bottlenecks for research-level mathematics. We address them by proposing a new human-AI discovery paradigm. The human input is no longer a single problem selected in advance, but a research direction in which the experts have interest and expertise. The system then searches a broad literature corpus for candidate problems in that direction. Inspired by search and recommender systems, we build Find, Attempt, and Recommend (FAR), a literature-to-review cascade that automates the search for suitable problems and focuses human attention on artifacts that have passed several stages of filtering. In a combinatorics pilot, the pipeline starts from 5,245 combinatorics papers, recovers 6,453 candidate conjectures or open problems, and filters them to 4,717 apparently well-posed and still-open conjectures. Subsequent reasoning and automated triage stages surface 598 potential resolutions and select 77 items for author-team review. Among them, we identify many interesting discoveries, including results on conjectures and questions of Davies--Jenssen--Perkins--Roberts, ErdÅs--Straus, Ikenmeyer--Pak--Panova, and Lund--Saraf--Wolf. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of this new mode of human-AI collaboration for mathematical discovery.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16977
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UniDot: A Unified Network for Sequence Modeling and Feature Interaction in Large-scale Recommendation
2026-08-17 16:52:56Rongcheng Lin, Yan Sun, Jamey Zhang, Guanglei Xiong, Ivan Ji, Xianjie Chen, Shujian BuAbstract
Industrial recommenders rely on two model families that have evolved largely independently: feature-interaction models over multi-field user/item features, and sequential models over user-behavior histories. Production systems couple them only loosely. To unify the two, we present UniDot, a novel architecture for post-click conversion prediction built from the factorization-machine (FM) point of view: the embedding inner product---which powers collaborative filtering and lets a recommender generalize to unseen user--item pairs---is the same primitive as attention's query dot key scoring, so a single dot-product of tokens can underlie both feature interaction and sequence modeling. UniDot tokenizes non-sequential fields and multi-domain behavioral sequences into one shared token space and stacks a single macro-block in which a token-mixing bus and a sequence-retrieval bus (item tokens cross-attending the histories) run in parallel and exchange state each layer through an MLP-Mixer fusion, while an FM Highway carries explicit per-layer dot-product interactions around the residual stack directly to the classifier. The sequence side is embedded once per forward pass and shared by all consumers, bounding inference latency. Trained with a dual sparse/dense (Adagrad + Muon) optimizer, an auxiliary conversion-delay head, and multi-path mutual learning, UniDot finished as the runner-up on the Industrial track of the TAAC KDD Cup 2026.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16797
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Position: Fairness Failure in Generative Models is an Evaluation Problem
2026-08-17 14:41:28Mariia Vladimirova, Jean-Yves Franceschi, Thibaut IssenhuthAbstract
Despite groundbreaking advancements in generative models during the last decade, concerns about their lack of fairness, reinforcing societal inequalities and harming marginalized groups, remain under-addressed and difficult to act upon. This position paper argues that fairness failures in generative models, albeit driven by multiple factors, are ultimately stemming from an evaluation problem: fairness findings are rarely comparable across papers or actionable for deployment decisions. This paper diagnoses recurring empirical and conceptual failure modes in current practice and motivates a shift from ad-hoc bias checks to standardized, generative-specific evaluation. We propose Fairness Cards as a minimal reporting artifact that makes evaluation choices explicit (prompt families, counterfactual protocols, metrics, and refusal handling) enabling reproducibility, comparability, and accountability. We conclude with additional recommendations towards a paradigm shift in evaluation standards. Our project page can be found at this https URL .
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16974
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