CaST-POI is a next‑point‑of‑interest recommender that conditions the user representation on each candidate location by adding bucketised biases for visit recency and geographic distance to the candidate. Unlike prior models that treat all candidates uniformly, CaST-POI lets each candidate read the trajectory with different attention weights grounded in real distance. Experiments on NYC, TKY, and CA datasets show significant MRR gains over seven baselines, with ablation revealing the importance of the revisit gate and spatial bias.
arXiv:2603.02561v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Attention mechanism remains the defining operator in Transformers since it provides expressive global credit assignment, yet its quadratic co...
arXiv:2606. 30139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relevance is not permission.
arXiv:2608. 15877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search and recommendation serve a shared discovery objective but encode intent differently.
arXiv:2608. 14021v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer-based sequential recommenders with causal self-attention often rely heavily on the most recent interaction at inference time, but how this behavior is structurally expressed in the representation used for prediction remains unclear.
arXiv:2511. 21095v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Early Stage Ranking (ESR) in large-scale recommendation systems is dominated by ''user--item decoupling'' Two Tower architectures, which scale efficiently but cannot capture fine-grained, target-aware user--item interactions directly.
arXiv:2607. 04270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful backbones for recommender systems by reformulating recommendation as a token-level generation task.
The paper presents a method for fine‑tuning a large language model (LLM) recommender to generate personalized, non‑harmful explanations for its recommendations. By training two LLM‑judge reward models and using constrained GRPO, the authors achieve a significant increase in the PASS rate for all three criteria, from 0.649 to 0.956 on their own judges and from 0.677 to 0.931 on an independent judge. The fine‑tuned model maintains its original recommendation performance, demonstrating that LLM‑based recommenders can be adapted to complex tasks without loss of effectiveness.
The paper introduces Warrant, a method that locates and controls the contributions of attention mechanisms to model metrics. Warrant exposes the item‑wise contribution path to the reported metric and applies query‑conditioned permission on that path. Experiments on multiple datasets show that Warrant improves primary metrics in most comparisons, reveals a weak correlation between attention and prediction utility, and demonstrates that learned permission can recover evidence ranking while suppressing distractors.
arXiv:2606.02737v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dense retrieval compresses a passage into a single vector, but this compression is positionally skewed: early content dominates the embedding...
Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful backbones for recommender systems by reformulating recommendation as a token-level generation task. Despite their promise, we identify a pervasive yet underexplored issue: $\textit{Length Bias}$.
arXiv:2607. 27692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Top-$K$ sparse attention reduces the cost of Softmax and value aggregation by attending to only a small subset of key--value (KV) entries.
arXiv:2606. 02737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dense retrieval models exhibit positional bias: retrieval effectiveness degrades when relevant information appears later in a passage (Zeng et al.