Personal Assistant Systems
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The current Federated Recommendation System (FedRS) focuses on personalized recommendation services and assumes clients are personalized IoT devices (e.g., mobile phones). In this paper, we deeply dive into new but practical FedRS applications within the joint venture ecosystem. Subsidiaries engage as participants with their users and items. However, in such a situation, merely exchanging item embedding is insufficient, as user bases always exhibit both overlaps and exclusive segments, demonstrating the complexity of user information. Meanwhile, directly uploading user information is a violation of privacy and unacceptable.
The Burden of Interactive Alignment with Inconsistent Preferences
From media platforms to chatbots, algorithms shape how people interact, learn, and discover information. Such interactions between users and an algorithm often unfold over multiple steps, during which strategic users can guide the algorithm to better align with their true interests by selectively engaging with content. However, users frequently exhibit inconsistent preferences: they may spend considerable time on content that offers little long-term value, inadvertently signaling that such content is desirable. Focusing on the user side, this raises a key question: what does it take for such users to align the algorithm with their true interests? To investigate these dynamics, we model the user's decision process as split between a rational "system 2" that decides whether to engage and an impulsive "system 1" that determines how long engagement lasts.
Negative Feedback Really Matters: Signed Dual-Channel Graph Contrastive Learning Framework for Recommendation
Traditional recommender systems have relied heavily on positive feedback for learning user preferences, while the abundance of negative feedback in real-world scenarios remains underutilized. To address this limitation, recent years have witnessed increasing attention on leveraging negative feedback in recommender systems to enhance recommendation performance. However, existing methods face three major challenges: limited model compatibility, ineffective information exchange, and computational inefficiency. To overcome these challenges, we propose a model-agnostic Signed Dual-Channel Graph Contrastive Learning (SDCGCL) framework that can be seamlessly integrated with existing graph contrastive learning methods. The framework features three key components: (1) a Dual-Channel Graph Embedding that separately processes positive and negative graphs, (2) a Cross-Channel Distribution Calibration mechanism to maintain structural consistency, and (3) an Adaptive Prediction Strategy that effectively combines signals from both channels. Building upon this framework, we further propose a Dual-channel Feedback Fusion (DualFuse) model and develop a two-stage optimization strategy to ensure efficient training. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by substantial margins while exhibiting minimal computational complexity.
Siri AI Hands On: A Smart, Helpful Assistant
The new Siri AI is conversational, omnipresent, and actually helpful. I'm outside hiking and testing a developer beta of Siri AI, Apple's revamped voice assistant, when fog engulfs the Golden Gate Bridge behind me. So, I pull out my iPhone and ask this new Siri where I can grab some fluffy pancakes nearby. A translucent orb at the top of the smartphone screen spins around a few times, then the voice assistant responds with a recommendation: a spot called Eats in the Inner Richmond. This version of Siri--conversational, omnipresent, actually helpful--has been long delayed.
Adaptive Preference Arithmetic: Modeling Dynamic Preference Strengths for LLMAgent Personalization
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as personalized user assistants, effectively adapting to users' evolving preferences is critical for delivering high-quality personalized responses. While user preferences are often stable in content, their relative strengths shift over time due to changing goals and contexts. Therefore, modeling these dynamic preference strengths can enable finer-grained personalization. However, current methods face two major challenges: (i) limited user feedback makes it difficult to estimate preference strengths accurately, and (ii) natural language ambiguity limits the controllability of preference-guided generation. To address these issues, we propose AdaPA-Agent, a LLM-agent personalization framework that models dynamic preference strengths via Adaptive Preference Arithmetic. First, instead of requiring additional user feedback, AdaPA-Agent employs an alignment-based strength estimation module to estimate the strength of user preferences from the existing user-agent interaction. Then, it guides controllable personalized generation by linearly combining next-token distributions, weighted by the estimated strengths of individual preferences. Experiments on two personalization tasks-conversational recommendation and personalized web interaction-demonstrate that AdaPA-Agent better aligning with users' changing intents, and has achieved over 18.9% and 14.2% improvements compared to ReAct, the widely-used agent framework.
Non-monotone Submodular Optimization: p-Matchoid Constraints and Fully Dynamic Setting
Submodular maximization subject to a p-matchoid constraint has various applications in machine learning, particularly in tasks such as feature selection, video and text summarization, movie recommendation, graph-based learning, and constraintbased optimization. We study this problem in the dynamic setting, where a sequence of insertions and deletions of elements to a p-matchoid M(V,I) occurs over time and the goal is to efficiently maintain an approximate solution. We propose a dynamic algorithm for non-monotone submodular maximization under a p-matchoid constraint. For a p-matchoid M(V,I) of rank k, defined by a collection of m matroids, our algorithm guarantees a (2p +2 p p(p +1) +1 +ϵ)-approximate solution at any time t in the update sequence, with an expected amortized query complexity of O(ϵ 3 pk4 log2(k)) per update.