arXiv Machine Learning

Bridging the Semantic-Collaborative Gap: An Asymmetric Graph Architecture for Cold-Start Item Recommendation

arXiv:2606. 06225v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collaborative filtering and graph-based recommendation models are highly effective because they leverage observed user interactions, but this dependence creates a fundamental cold-start challenge when newly added content has no interaction history.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

TokenMinds: Pretrained User Tokens and Embeddings for User Understanding in Large Recommender Systems

arXiv:2606. 25147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: User modeling in industrial recommender systems typically produces dense embeddings, which suffer from representational constraints inherent to fixed-dimensional vectors.

By Qingyun Liu, Bo Yan, Yang Liu, Yuji Roh, Ekansh Sharma, Likang Yin, Emma Olowo, Min-hsuan Tsai, Yuxuan Li, Diego Uribe, Saksham Aggarwal, Siqi Wu, Yuan Hao, Vikas Kedigehalli, Lukasz Heldt, Lichan Hong, Li Wei, Xinyang Yi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Personalized and Multi-View Representation for Federated Cold-Start Recommendation

The paper introduces PMFRec, a federated cold-start recommendation framework that addresses personalization, compositionality, and communication inefficiencies. PMFRec generates user-specific item representations from attribute features, employs a global multi-view encoder with adaptive gating and orthogonality to capture complementary semantics, and fuses collaborative and attribute knowledge into a single exchanged representation. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that PMFRec outperforms strong baselines in cold-item recommendation while improving user-level fairness, warm-scenario adaptability, and robustness under Local Differential Privacy.

By Jaehyung Lim, Wonbin Kweon, Woojoo Kim, Junyoung Kim, Dongha Kim, Hwanjo Yu
arXiv AI
Jun 19

VCG: A Multimodal Retrieval Framework for E-Commerce Video Feeds under Extreme Cold-Start Conditions

arXiv:2606. 19627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The digital commerce landscape is shifting from static, search-driven catalogs to dynamic, immersive video feeds.

By Katya Mirylenka, Egor Malykh, Mahdyar Ravanbakhsh, Michael Gygli, Marco-Andrea Buchmann, Andrew Dzhoha, Svitlana Borzenko, Francesca Catino, Mohamed Gaafar, Maarten Versteegh, Thomas Kober, Dario d'Andrea, Ellie Langhans
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Beyond Item IDs: Scaling Short-Form-Video Recommendation via Semantic-Native Long Sequence Modeling

arXiv:2606. 07546v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Capturing user interests across extensive watch histories is critical for short-form video recommendation, yet scaling sequence length is limited by two bottlenecks: the semantic sparsity of atomic Video IDs and the quadratic computational complexity of Transformers.

By Ruixiao Sun, Diego Uribe Mora, Zhimeng Jiang, Yuanzhen Lin, Jiarui Wang, Yuening Li, Danfeng Guo, Zhizhong Chen, Chuan He, Liang Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

A Multi-Source Ensemble Approach to Candidate Generation for Alternative Vacation Rental Property Recommendations

The paper studies candidate generation for alternative vacation rental recommendations, comparing collaborative filtering, shallow embeddings, and graph neural network (GNN) methods on a platform with over 2 million active properties. A hybrid model that combines item-based collaborative filtering with GNN-based retrieval achieves a 14.8% higher Recall@300 than the best baseline, leveraging each method’s strengths: collaborative filtering for well-interacted properties and GNNs for diverse, cold-start alternatives. The authors also show that stronger candidate pools improve downstream ranking quality, though the exact impact is intertwined with ranker training.

By Syed Mohammed Arshad Zaidi, Eric Rincon, Shayan Hassantabar
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

POI Recommendation with LLM-Augmented Multi-Graph Learning and Contrastive Alignment

arXiv:2608. 16407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation models based on graph neural networks achieve strong performance by propagating collaborative signals over user-item interactions, yet they struggle with the cold-start problem, where items with few or no interactions are not represented.

By Burak Tamer, Wolfram H\"opken, Zehui Wang
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 AI
Jun 26

The Best of the Two Worlds: Harmonizing Semantic and Hash IDs for Sequential Recommendation

arXiv:2512. 10388v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Conventional Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS) typically assign unique hash IDs (HID) to construct item embeddings, which mainly capture collaborative signals from historical user-item interactions.

By Ziwei Liu, Yejing Wang, Wanyu Wang, Wang Zejian, Qidong Liu, Zijian Zhang, Chong Chen, Wei Huang, Xiangyu Zhao