arXiv AI

LightCRS: Lightweight Multi-Domain Conversational Recommendation System

LightCRS is a lightweight, query‑conditioned framework that enables unified multi‑domain multimodal conversational recommendation by precomputing multimodal product representations with frozen encoders and fusing them online via a compact 5.3M‑parameter module using cross‑attention. The system shares parameters across all domains and employs an inter‑candidate Transformer to compare candidates jointly. On the newly constructed MM‑R2A‑25 benchmark, LightCRS achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance, improving HR@1 by 35.4% over the strongest baseline and reducing per‑query latency by 266×, while joint multi‑domain training alone boosts HR@1 by 15.2% compared to single‑domain models.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

From Gradient-Boosted Trees to Deep Recommenders: Practical Lessons from Migrating a Production Customer Support Recommender

The paper documents the migration of a live conversational recommendation system from a gradient‑boosted multiclass model to a pairwise‑binary deep recommender. It explains how reformulating the task, using negative sampling, noise injection, and attention pooling over transcript chunks enabled the new model to handle dynamic, multimodal data and long conversation context. The authors compare several architectures and loss functions, showing that the deep recommender matches or surpasses the CatBoost baseline, especially in later conversational stages.

By Sonia Sharma, Jeyendran Balakrishnan, Shreya Rajpal, Swapnil Parekh, Nagaraj Janardhana, Andrew Mattarella-Micke
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 3

GALA: Generative Aligned Learning for Adaptive Multimodal Representation in the Taobao Shangou Recommender System

arXiv:2607. 29213v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern recommender systems in food delivery increasingly leverage multimodal signals, including images, text, and user interaction histories, to enhance user experience, yet effective fusion of these heterogeneous modalities remains challenging, hindering both the joint modeling of multimodal signals and adaptation to evolving user intent.

By Jiping Liu, Zhongmin Zhang, Zisen Sang, Zhijia Fang, Tao Ouyang, Ma Jiang, Shaopeng Liang, Zeyang Hou, Guodong Cao, Jia Jia
arXiv AI
Aug 13

VLM2Rec: Resolving Modality Collapse in Vision-Language Model Embedders for Multimodal Sequential Recommendation

arXiv:2603. 17450v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sequential Recommendation (SR) in multimodal settings typically relies on small frozen pretrained encoders, which limits semantic capacity and prevents Collaborative Filtering (CF) signals from being fully integrated into item representations.

By Junyoung Kim, Woojoo Kim, Wonbin Kweon, Jaehyung Lim, Dongha Kim, Hwanjo Yu
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Retrieval, Scoring, and Decoding Shape Performance and Stability in LLM-based Conversational Recommendation

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.

By Ante Kapetanovic, Tomislav Duricic, Andro Mercep, Emanuel Lacic
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

Multimodal Graph Retrieval-Augmented Sequential Recommendation via Collaborative Filtering Paths

The paper introduces MGRASRec, a multimodal graph retrieval-augmented framework that enhances sequential recommendation by incorporating collaborative filtering signals directly into a multimodal large language model (MLLM) prompt. It retrieves structured paths from a user-item interaction graph, extending them with multimodal similarity to broaden coverage and surface the most relevant history items for each candidate item. This approach eliminates the need for recurrent summarization, requiring only a single forward pass per candidate and achieving superior performance across three datasets, especially in ranking quality.

By Jason Marcell Setiadi, Xin Cao, Lina Yao
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 19

MLLM Frame Subset Ensembling for Audio-Visual Video QA and MLLM-based Reranking for Ad-hoc Video Search in TRECVID 2025

The paper describes the CERTH-ITI team’s approach to the TRECVID 2025 Ad-hoc Video Search (AVS) and Video Question Answering (VQA) tracks. For AVS, a two-stage framework uses foundation vision‑language models for initial retrieval and a Multimodal‑LLM for reranking, improving contextual matching without training. In VQA, an audio‑visual MLLM is fine‑tuned and enhanced with inference‑time scaling; answer generation employs majority voting over responses from random frame subsets, while multiple‑choice responses use mean‑pooling logits, yielding top performance on VQA metrics.

By Andreas Goulas, Damianos Galanopoulos, Ioannis Patras, Vasileios Mezaris