arXiv Machine Learning By Jianru Shen

TailSpec-EASE: Knowledge-Graph-Regularized Linear Recommendation for Web Long-Tail Discovery

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TailSpec-EASE is a lightweight linear recommender that incorporates a relation‑aware spectral knowledge‑graph prior into a local closed‑form reconstruction objective. By adapting the prior strength to item popularity, it provides stronger semantic guidance for long‑tail items. Across four public benchmarks, it achieves a favorable balance of overall accuracy, long‑tail performance, and training cost, improving NDCG@20 by up to 24% over a no‑KG baseline and training in just 37 seconds on CPU compared to thousands of seconds for GPU‑based KGAT and CPU LightGCN.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Diagnosing and Mitigating Retrieval Bottlenecks in LLM-Based Cold-Start Recommendation

arXiv:2606. 29947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as rerankers in recommender systems, with the expectation that semantic understanding will help in cold-start and long-tail regimes.

By Zhe Dong (University of Maine at Presque Isle), Fang Qin (Stanford University), Manish Shah (Independent Researcher), Yicheng Wang (Independent Researcher)
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

The Recall Ceiling of LLM Recommendation Reranking

The paper examines LLM-based recommendation rerankers that are often evaluated under an oracle protocol, which guarantees the ground-truth item is present in the scored set. Across Amazon datasets, this protocol overestimates realistic NDCG@10 by 92–95% because realistic retrieval only covers 2–19% of relevant items at K=100, creating a recall ceiling that limits any closed-candidate reranker's top‑k NDCG. The authors find that various optimisation strategies—including prompt engineering, model scaling, sequential models, supervised neural rerankers, LoRA fine‑tuning, hybrid retrieval, score‑aware prompting, and LLM+CF fusion—do not significantly improve over a collaborative‑filtering baseline under realistic retrieval, and they propose a Recall‑Aware Evaluation Protocol (RAEP) to better assess rerankers in low‑recall regimes.

By Zhaohui Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Continual Graph Memory for Adaptive Recommendation under Intent Drift

The paper introduces CGM-Rec, a continual graph memory framework designed for adaptive recommendation in the presence of intent drift. CGM-Rec treats the knowledge graph as writable memory, comprising a conservative Semantic Graph Memory for stable relational knowledge and a fast-reactive Episodic Lesson Memory for recent outcomes and corrective hints. Experiments show that, with frozen model parameters and one-pass reranking, CGM-Rec outperforms neural and LLM-based baselines across multiple recommendation settings, achieving significant gains such as a 29.58% improvement in HR@1 over the strongest LLM baseline on Bundle.

By Hao Nguyen Ngoc, Tung Nguyen, Nguyen Thi Hanh, Hoang Thai Dinh, Nguyen Xuan Tung