arXiv AI
6d ago

Evidence Before Sampling: Interpretable Implicit Negative Candidate Discovery for Recommendation

The paper introduces a method for discovering implicit negative candidates in recommender systems by extracting symbolic rules from observed customer behavior. These rules are scored on support, informativeness, and product relevance, then interpreted by a large language model to align with business objectives. Experiments in an industrial B2B setting and on five public datasets show that the approach improves precision and downstream PR-AUC compared to baseline negative sampling methods.

By Shreya Rajpal, Sonia Sharma, Swapnil Parekh, Lisa Li, Jeyendran Balakrishnan, Nagaraj Janardhana, Andrew Mattarella-Micke
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 Computation and Language
Sep 11

LLMAR: A Tuning-Free Recommendation Framework for Sparse and Text-Rich Industrial Domains

LLMAR is a tuning‑free recommendation framework designed for sparse, text‑rich industrial B2B domains. It transforms user behavioral history into structured semantic motives using LLM inference, employs a reflection loop to self‑correct hallucinations, and operates cost‑effectively with asynchronous batch processing. Experiments on MovieLens‑1M, Amazon Prime Pantry, and a construction risk dataset show LLMAR surpasses state‑of‑the‑art learning models, achieving up to a 54.6% nDCG@10 improvement while keeping inference costs around $1 per 1,000 users.

By Ryogo Hishikawa, Ichiro Kataoka, Shinya Yuda
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Beyond Sequences: Distilling Structured Decision Memory for LLM Recommendation

The paper introduces MARI, a Memory-Augmented Recommendation system that uses a Decision Memory Bank to store Structured Decision Memories (SDMs) capturing users’ goals, constraints, and trade-offs. Unlike prior methods that flatten heterogeneous behaviors into token sequences, MARI retrieves relevant SDMs to enhance LLM reasoning, improving performance on next-item prediction and a new Difficult Choice Prediction task while keeping latency low. The approach also provides interpretable, human-readable insights into user decision-making.

By Leikun Liang, Guoshuai Wang, Xingsheng He, Yushan Han, Yunyi Xuan, Xiaoxiao Xu, Lin Qu
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Scaling Articulated Rationales for MLLM-based Recommendation

The paper introduces SARA, an industrial framework that scales articulated user rationales (AURs) for recommendation systems. It curates a high‑quality AUR dataset from 240 M users, trains a 7B‑parameter MLLM (SARA‑7B) to generate rationales for millions of authors, and integrates these generated rationales into a production ranking model (SARA‑Ranker). Offline and online experiments demonstrate that the system produces more specific, polarity‑consistent rationales and improves user engagement while reducing negative feedback.

By Haoke Xiao, Yueyang Liu, Yuhui Zhang, Xiang Chen, Yufei Liu, Jia Xu, Yalong Guan, Xiaolan Zhu, Xiaoyu Zhang, Shijun Wang, Shuang Yang, Zijie Meng, Zejian Zhang, Ruochen Yang, Xiangyu Wu, Tingting Gao, Han Li, Lantao Hu, Cheng Luo, Kun Gai