arXiv AI

How Much Do Reviews Really Contribute? A Study on Text-Enriched Matrix Factorization for Recommendations

arXiv:2606. 16973v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Incorporating textual reviews into a Recommender System has become a prominent strategy for enriching collaborative signals with semantic information.

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 17

Reproducing Transparent and Scrutable Recommendations: Exploring Open-Weight Models via Natural-Language User Profiles

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Preserving Item Semantics for Free: Rethinking Token Initialization in LLM-Based Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2608. 07816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative recommendation (GR) leverage large language models (LLMs) as recommender backbones, enabling LLMs to directly generate recommendations conditioned on item-interaction histories.

By Donald Loveland, Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar, Danai Koutra, Neil Shah
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Reproducing Transparent and Scrutable Recommendations: Exploring Open-Weight Models via Natural-Language User Profiles

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 AI
Aug 28

When Memory Takes Gradients: Collaborative Vector Memory for Agentic Recommender Systems

The paper introduces CoVeMem, a Collaborative Vector Memory system that replaces text-based memory in agentic recommender systems with vectorized user and item states derived from a frozen LightGCN model. By retrieving relevant historical states at each decision and integrating them as soft tokens in the LLM’s context, CoVeMem enables contrastive alignment and listwise co‑training to learn how to read and rank these states, achieving performance on par with or better than existing text‑memory agents across multiple benchmarks without extra LLM calls for memory updates.

By Hanchong Chen, Xing Tang, Lingjie Li, Xiongfeng Shan, Xiuqiang He
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