The paper proposes replacing multiple horizon‑specific binary classifiers with a single survival model to predict time‑to‑repurchase in grocery e‑commerce. Empirical analysis shows a slightly decreasing hazard (k≈0.9) and that a Log‑Normal model best fits marginal distributions while Weibull best fits residuals. A single Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) model matches or surpasses per‑horizon classifiers with fewer trees, and a 4‑parameter calibration maps survival CDFs to horizon probabilities without monotonicity violations, revealing a trade‑off between calibration and ranking within the AFT family.
By Akshay Kekuda, Shreeranjani Srirangamsridharan, Ishan Bhatt, Yanan Cao, Sinduja Subramaniam, Evren Korpeoglu, Kaushiki Nag, Kannan Achan
arXiv:2602. 12972v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In online advertising, marketing interventions such as coupons introduce significant confounding bias into Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction.
By Siyun Yang, Shixiao Yang, Jian Wang, Di Fan, Kehe Cai, Haoyan Fu, Jiaming Zhang, Wenjin Wu, Peng Jiang
arXiv:2511. 07280v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Personalized recommendation systems shape much of user choice online, yet their targeted nature makes separating out the value of recommendation and the underlying goods challenging.
By Kevin Zielnicki, Guy Aridor, Aur\'elien Bibaut, Allen Tran, Winston Chou, Nathan Kallus
The paper introduces the Behavior-to-Value (B2V) task, which seeks to identify consumer values from e-commerce behavioral trajectories. It presents the E-commerce Consumption Value Taxonomy (ECVT) and the B2V-Bench dataset, derived from anonymized Taobao logs and covering 25 purchase behaviors with associated value orientations. A new model, B2V-Verifier, is proposed to improve value measurement accuracy, achieving a 34% boost in multi-label classification over strong LLM baselines.
By Peixuan Hou, Bin Chen, Li He, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng, Xiuli Ma, Guojie Song
The paper introduces a counterfactual observability framework for Netflix’s recommender systems, aiming to disentangle raw engagement signals—such as views and clicks—from confounding factors like content quality, model behavior, presentation bias, and audience reach. It proposes three stakeholder‑centered principles and measurement methods that reduce bias, assess relativity, and capture incrementality, applicable to both single‑stage and cascading recommender architectures. The framework is demonstrated through multiple production deployments, showing its effectiveness in enhancing observability across Netflix’s recommendation pipelines.
By Chaoran Guo, Ding Tong, Ting-Po Lee, Scarlet Chen
The study evaluates whether large language models (LLMs) used as synthetic personas can predict real audience responses to marketing copy. Using thousands of headline A/B tests from the Upworthy Research Archive, the authors compare a ten-persona panel grounded in real audience demographics to a no-persona zero‑shot baseline that asks the model for a typical reader’s click likelihood. Results show that the no‑persona baseline outperforms the persona‑based approach, with higher predictive validity and top‑1 accuracy, indicating that forcing the model to role‑play specific personas introduces bias and noise.
By Alexandre Cristov\~ao Maiorano
This reproducibility study confirms that incorporating generated natural‑language user profiles into recommender systems enhances transparency and allows users to directly intervene by correcting preferences or addressing cold‑start issues. The authors replicated the original findings and extended the evaluation with context ablation, multi‑seed stability tests, and mechanistic interpretability analysis using nnsight. Their results show that while perturbing profiles shifts predicted ratings uniformly across genres, the overall rankings remain unchanged, attributing this to the rating‑regression objective rather than the profile interface.
By Noah Mami\'e, Laurin van den Bergh
arXiv:2608. 10562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Not all clicks are equal.
By Shiwen Shen, Xiru Huang, Liang Luo, Jianbo Sun, He Lyu, Zihang Fu, Ivonne Xu, Zhizhuo Li, Zhengyu Zhang, Pei-Ju Sung, Yunmiao Wang, Zixuan Wang, Zhengli Zhao, Qiang Jin, Mike Jermann, Mingda Li, Yang Xiao, Bhavana Challa, Brooke Bian, Yang Li, Ashish Chamoli, Bibek Bhusal, Danning Di, Yuan Jin, Meet Raval, Zhiwen Chen, Boyao Sun, Shuguang Wang, Yunlong He, Yantao Yao, Sagar Chordia, Wenlin Chen, Santanu Kolay, Qin Huang, Ellie Wen
The study reproduces a prior work on recommender systems that use generated natural‑language user profiles to enhance transparency and user control. It confirms that the User Profile Recommendation (UPR) model performs competitively and that altering these profiles uniformly shifts predicted ratings without changing ranking order. Additional experiments include context ablation, multi‑seed stability, and mechanistic interpretability analysis with the nnsight framework.
Human values are deep motivational orientations that shape human behaviors. In e-commerce, they reveal the stable drivers behind users' purchase decisions. Compared with short-term interests, consumer...
FairDiff is a new fairness‑aware diffusion framework designed to mitigate the self‑reinforcing Matthew Effect in Diffusion Recommender Models (DRMs). It introduces Popularity Condition Guidance (PCG) to reweight inference‑time gradients and penalize high‑popularity items, and a Semantic Calibration (SC) module that aligns forward and reverse distributions via optimal transport. Experiments show FairDiff achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance while reducing popularity bias in DRMs.
By Song-Li Wu, Xianquan Wang, Zhaocheng Du, Weinan Gan, Jingyi Wang
arXiv:2607. 19526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: "Stop Chasing the C-index when Evaluating Survival Analysis Models" (ICML 2026, Spotlight) argued normatively, on synthetic data, that evaluating survival models by discrimination alone, i.
By Rafael da Silva, Danilo Alvares