arXiv AI

Residual Dominance as a Structural Account of Last-Item Reliance in Causal Self-Attention Recommenders

arXiv:2608. 14021v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer-based sequential recommenders with causal self-attention often rely heavily on the most recent interaction at inference time, but how this behavior is structurally expressed in the representation used for prediction remains unclear.

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 Machine Learning
Aug 5

Target-Aware Early Stage Ranking

arXiv:2511. 21095v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Early Stage Ranking (ESR) in large-scale recommendation systems is dominated by ''user--item decoupling'' Two Tower architectures, which scale efficiently but cannot capture fine-grained, target-aware user--item interactions directly.

By Juhee Hong, Meng Liu, Shengzhi Wang, Jin Zhou, Xiaoheng Mao, Zhao Zhu, Ruochen Liu, Huihui Cheng, Leon Gao, Christopher Leung, Chandra Mouli Sekar, Yijia Liu, Boyang Yu, Tuan Trieu, Dawei Sun, Jeet Kanjani, Rui Li, Jing Qian, Xuan Cao, Minjie Fan, Mingze Gao
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Critical attention scaling in long-context transformers

arXiv:2510. 05554v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models scale to longer contexts, attention layers suffer from a fundamental pathology: attention scores collapse toward uniformity as context length $n$ increases, causing tokens to cluster excessively, a phenomenon known as rank-collapse.

By Shi Chen, Zhengjiang Lin, Yury Polyanskiy, Philippe Rigollet
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Probabilistic Residual Learning for Online Recommendations

arXiv:2607. 20863v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern recommender systems are typically based on deep learning (DL) models, where a dense encoder learns representations of users and items.

By Wenyuan Wang, Yusong Zhao, Zihao Xu, Hengyi Wang, Qi Xu, Zhigang Hua, Yan Xie, Yi Wang, Zihao Zhao, Bo Long, Chengzhi Mao, Shuang Yang, Hengguan Huang, Hao Wang