E-Commerce customer support requires quick and accurate answers grounded in product data and past support cases. This paper develops a novel retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that uses knowledge graphs (KGs) to improve the relevance of the answer and the factual grounding. We examine recent advances in knowledge-augmented RAG and chatbots based on large language models (LLM) in customer support, including Microsoft's GraphRAG and hybrid retrieval architectures. We then propose a new answer synthesis algorithm that combines structured subgraphs from a domain-specific KG with text documents retrieved from support archives, producing more coherent and grounded responses. We detail the architecture and knowledge flow of our system, provide comprehensive experimental evaluation, and justify its design in real-time support settings. Our implementation demonstrates 23\% improvement in factual accuracy and 89\% user satisfaction in e-Commerce QA scenarios.

The rapid advancement of generative AI technologies is driving the integration of diverse AI-powered services into smartphones, transforming how users interact with their devices. To simplify access to predefined AI services, this paper introduces MIRA, a pioneering framework for task instruction recommendation that enables intuitive one-touch AI tasking on smartphones. With MIRA, users can long-press on images or text objects to receive contextually relevant instruction recommendations for executing AI tasks. Our work introduces three key innovations: 1) A multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based recommendation pipeline with structured reasoning to extract key entities, infer user intent, and generate precise instructions; 2) A template-augmented reasoning mechanism that integrates high-level reasoning templates, enhancing task inference accuracy; 3) A prefix-tree-based constrained decoding strategy that restricts outputs to predefined instruction candidates, ensuring coherent and intent-aligned suggestions. Through evaluation using a real-world annotated datasets and a user study, MIRA has demonstrated substantial improvements in the accuracy of instruction recommendation. The encouraging results highlight MIRA's potential to revolutionize the way users engage with AI services on their smartphones, offering a more seamless and efficient experience.

This paper proposes the MT-DQN model, which integrates a Transformer, Temporal Graph Neural Network (TGNN), and Deep Q-Network (DQN) to address the challenges of predicting user behavior and optimizing recommendation strategies in short-video environments. Experiments demonstrated that MT-DQN consistently outperforms traditional concatenated models, such as Concat-Modal, achieving an average F1-score improvement of 10.97% and an average NDCG@5 improvement of 8.3%. Compared to the classic reinforcement learning model Vanilla-DQN, MT-DQN reduces MSE by 34.8% and MAE by 26.5%. Nonetheless, we also recognize challenges in deploying MT-DQN in real-world scenarios, such as its computational cost and latency sensitivity during online inference, which will be addressed through future architectural optimization.

In the era of rapid development of social media, social recommendation systems as hybrid recommendation systems have been widely applied. Existing methods capture interest similarity between users to filter out interest-irrelevant relations in social networks that inevitably decrease recommendation accuracy, however, limited research has a focus on the mutual influence of semantic information between the social network and the user-item interaction network for further improving social recommendation. To address these issues, we introduce a social \underline{r}ecommendation model with ro\underline{bu}st g\underline{r}aph denoisin\underline{g}-augmentation fusion and multi-s\underline{e}mantic Modeling(Burger). Specifically, we firstly propose to construct a social tensor in order to smooth the training process of the model. Then, a graph convolutional network and a tensor convolutional network are employed to capture user's item preference and social preference, respectively. Considering the different semantic information in the user-item interaction network and the social network, a bi-semantic coordination loss is proposed to model the mutual influence of semantic information. To alleviate the interference of interest-irrelevant relations on multi-semantic modeling, we further use Bayesian posterior probability to mine potential social relations to replace social noise. Finally, the sliding window mechanism is utilized to update the social tensor as the input for the next iteration. Extensive experiments on three real datasets show Burger has a superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art models.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Amazon's next-gen Echo and Kindle devices are almost here New Echo devices powered by Alexa+ are on the menu, including revamped Kindle hardware. Get ready for a parade of new Amazon devices--including Echo speakers powered by the new AI Alexa--at showcase in New York City later this month. The event is slated for September 30, and the timing puts Amazon back on track for its usual fall preview of its latest wares. Amazon skipped its typical fall event last year in favor of a smaller Kindle-only unveiling.

While optimizing recommendation systems for user engagement is a well-established practice, effectively diversifying recommendations without negatively impacting core business metrics remains a significant industry challenge. In line with our initiative to broaden our audience's cultural practices, this study investigates using personalized Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) to sample diverse and relevant recommendations. We rely on a well-known quality-diversity decomposition of the similarity kernel to give more weight to user preferences. In this paper, we present our implementations of the personalized DPP sampling, evaluate the trade-offs between relevance and diversity through both offline and online metrics, and give insights for practitioners on their use in a production environment. For the sake of reproducibility, we release the full code for our platform and experiments on GitHub.

Modern recommendation systems aim to increase click-through rates (CTR) for better user experience, through commonly treating ranking as a classification task focused on predicting CTR. However, there is a gap between this method and the actual objectives of businesses across different sectors. In video recommendation services, the objective of video on demand (VOD) extends beyond merely encouraging clicks, but also guiding users to discover their true interests, leading to increased watch time. And longer users watch time will leads to more revenue through increased chances of presenting online display advertisements. This research addresses the issue by redefining the problem from classification to regression, with a focus on maximizing revenue through user viewing time. Due to the lack of positive labels on recommendation, the study introduces Tweedie Loss Function, which is better suited in this scenario than the traditional mean square error loss. The paper also provides insights on how Tweedie process capture users diverse interests. Our offline simulation and online A/B test revealed that we can substantially enhance our core business objectives: user engagement in terms of viewing time and, consequently, revenue. Additionally, we provide a theoretical comparison between the Tweedie Loss and the commonly employed viewing time weighted Logloss, highlighting why Tweedie Regression stands out as an efficient solution. We further outline a framework for designing a loss function that focuses on a singular objective.

Recommender systems often benefit from complex feature embeddings and deep learning algorithms, which deliver sophisticated recommendations that enhance user experience, engagement, and revenue. However, these methods frequently reduce the interpretability and transparency of the system. In this research, we develop a systematic application, adaptation, and evaluation of deletion diagnostics in the recommender setting. The method compares the performance of a model to that of a similar model trained without a specific user or item, allowing us to quantify how that observation influences the recommender, either positively or negatively. To demonstrate its model-agnostic nature, the proposal is applied to both Neural Collaborative Filtering (NCF), a widely used deep learning-based recommender, and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), a classical collaborative filtering technique. Experiments on the MovieLens and Amazon Reviews datasets provide insights into model behavior and highlight the generality of the approach across different recommendation paradigms.

The large language model (LLM) powered recommendation paradigm has been proposed to address the limitations of traditional recommender systems, which often struggle to handle cold start users or items with new IDs. Despite its effectiveness, this study uncovers that LLM empowered recommender systems are vulnerable to reconstruction attacks that can expose both system and user privacy. To examine this threat, we present the first systematic study on inversion attacks targeting LLM empowered recommender systems, where adversaries attempt to reconstruct original prompts that contain personal preferences, interaction histories, and demographic attributes by exploiting the output logits of recommendation models. We reproduce the vec2text framework and optimize it using our proposed method called Similarity Guided Refinement, enabling more accurate reconstruction of textual prompts from model generated logits. Extensive experiments across two domains (movies and books) and two representative LLM based recommendation models demonstrate that our method achieves high fidelity reconstructions. Specifically, we can recover nearly 65 percent of the user interacted items and correctly infer age and gender in 87 percent of the cases. The experiments also reveal that privacy leakage is largely insensitive to the victim model's performance but highly dependent on domain consistency and prompt complexity. These findings expose critical privacy vulnerabilities in LLM empowered recommender systems.

Gear News of the Week: Google's Next-Gen Nest Cams Are Coming, and Sony Debuts a New Xperia Phone Plus: Qualcomm unveils Quick Charge 5+, Solo Stove has an easier-to-light firepit, Nikon debuts a cinema camera, and xMEMS upgrades the bass on its headphone tech. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Google has accidentally leaked its new Nest security cameras and video doorbell line. Setup options appeared in the Google Home app for wired versions of the Nest Cam Indoor (3rd gen), Nest Cam Outdoor (2nd gen), and Nest Doorbell (3rd gen), as reported by Android Authority .