arXiv Machine Learning

Normative Alignment of Recommender Systems via Internal Label Shift

arXiv:2607. 10915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce NAILS (Normative Alignment of Recommender Systems via Internal Label Shift), a simple and scalable method for aligning recommendation outputs with target distributions over item-level attributes, such as categories.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

SpecFormer: Mitigating Embedding and Attention Collapse via Spectral-Aware Transformer for Recommendation

arXiv:2607. 24025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains; however, directly applying their standard self-attention mechanism to recommendation often yields suboptimal performance, sometimes even trailing behind well-designed simple recommendation models.

By Yu Cui, Yi Xu, Jiahao Wang, Hao Zhang, Yu Zhang, Xiaoyi Zeng, Can Wang, Jinxin Hu, Jiawei Chen
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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

The Value of Personalized Recommendations: Evidence from Netflix

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
arXiv AI
Aug 19

CARA: Cognitive Adaptive Recommendation Agent

CAR A is a recommendation framework that treats recommendation as a structured decision‑making process. It separates recommendation into two stages: candidate filtering, which narrows the search space using coarse preference constraints, and dual‑perspective decision modeling, which captures decisions through affective and rational judgments. A boundary‑aware KTO strategy is introduced to prioritize instructions that the model can solve occasionally but not consistently, thereby enriching preference signals. Experiments on three Amazon Reviews domains show CAR A outperforms baselines, achieving up to a 10.15% relative improvement on most metrics.

By Weijun Gao, Jinyang Dong, Chuanru Ren, Hengxiao Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 26

DualEval: Joint Model-Item Calibration for Unified LLM Evaluation

arXiv:2606. 26429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current LLM evaluation relies on two complementary but often disconnected signals: static benchmarks with objective correctness labels and arena-style preference data that better reflect open-ended user interactions.

By Aaron J. Li, Hao Huang, Youngmin Park, Yitong Ma, Wei-Lin Chiang, Li Chen, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Bin Yu, Ion Stoica