We present Team Semiintelligencn's solution for the ACM RecSys 2026 TalkPlayData Challenge, addressing conversational music recommendation through a multi-modal and personalized conversational recomme...
arXiv:2606. 00125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Music recommendation systems typically treat songs as opaque tokens, relying on collaborative interaction histories which overlooks semantic or acoustic content.
The study evaluates large language models (LLMs) as rerankers in conversational movie recommendation, comparing proprietary, open-weight, and fine-tuned LLMs against collaborative-filtering and sequential baselines on the ReDial benchmark. Results show that the best proprietary LLM achieves an NDCG@10 of 0.1497 with a shared semantic candidate pool, outperforming non-LLM baselines, while open-weight LLMs do not surpass a tuned shallow autoencoder under the same protocol. The analysis also highlights that reranker performance is highly sensitive to candidate generation, pool size, scoring policy, and decoding temperature, suggesting these factors should be reported as standard evaluation fields.
MUUNRiver-Bench is a diagnostic benchmark for music retrieval that uses natural‑language instructions to define relevance for reference‑audio queries. It contains 3,440 tracks across 13 genres and 116 sub‑genres and covers seven tasks such as similar‑music, style‑preserving lyric‑rewriting, cover, and segment retrieval. Experiments with six models in eight configurations show that acoustic encoders favor local identity while text‑aligned encoders favor semantic relations, and that instruction‑aware and audio‑text fusion systems do not consistently outperform their backbones.
The paper introduces STeReO, a reranker that orchestrates speech and text retrievers to aggregate evidence from heterogeneous databases. It addresses the scarcity of training data by curating a dataset of queries, mixed-modality evidence, and relevance rankings, then trains and evaluates the reranker in both single- and mixed-modality settings. Results show that STeReO effectively selects the most relevant evidence, leading to significant improvements in downstream question‑answering performance.
arXiv:2610.15864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale personalization is shifting from embedding-table retrieval to LLM-based recommenders that generate the Semantic ID (SID) of the item to r...
The paper introduces SCALAR, a query‑conditioned spherical centroid aggregator that assigns relevance‑based weights to each available modality before computing a spherical centroid. SCALAR supports arbitrary modality subsets, is trained with rank‑8 LoRA adapters on masked views, and achieves positive aggregation gains on four of five benchmarks, outperforming prior symmetric aggregators. With only 4.8 million trainable parameters, SCALAR attains the highest text‑to‑video R@1 on three benchmarks and surpasses the released GRAM checkpoint under test‑time modality dropout by 3.2 to 10.9 R@1.
arXiv:2606. 10010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluating text-to-music (TTM) systems remains expensive because music impression (MI) and text alignment (TA) scores rely on human mean opinion scores (MOS).
arXiv:2607. 24846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional conversational recommenders entangle retrieval and response generation within a single text interface, so exact entity cues fade as the dialogue's intent evolves, which compromises explanation credibility.
Traditional conversational recommenders entangle retrieval and response generation within a single text interface, so exact entity cues fade as the dialogue's intent evolves, which compromises explanation credibility. We address this within the ACM RecSys Challenge 2026, which mandates both top-20 ranking and evidence-grounded response generation.
Lychee‑Reranker is a fast, not‑late‑interaction reranker that decouples query and passage computation while preserving expressive relevance modeling. It uses an encoder–decoder architecture: passages are pre‑encoded with Matryoshka embedding pooling, and the decoder jointly processes system/user instructions and query intent, with cross‑attention capturing fine‑grained relevance. The design yields four benefits—offline passage encoding for efficiency, cross‑attention expressiveness, compact Matryoshka pooling, and adjustable test‑time compute—and is available in Nano, Small, and Large sizes (0.27B, 1B, and 4B activated parameters).
arXiv:2609.14565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based sequential recommenders usually cast next-item prediction as text generation, but this interface is poorly matched to full-catalog top-K rank...