Personal Assistant Systems
Scholar Inbox: Personalized Paper Recommendations for Scientists
Flicke, Markus, Angrabeit, Glenn, Iyengar, Madhav, Protsenko, Vitalii, Shakun, Illia, Cicvaric, Jovan, Kargi, Bora, He, Haoyu, Schuler, Lukas, Scholz, Lewin, Agnihotri, Kavyanjali, Cao, Yong, Geiger, Andreas
Scholar Inbox is a new open-access platform designed to address the challenges researchers face in staying current with the rapidly expanding volume of scientific literature. We provide personalized recommendations, continuous updates from open-access archives (arXiv, bioRxiv, etc.), visual paper summaries, semantic search, and a range of tools to streamline research workflows and promote open research access. The platform's personalized recommendation system is trained on user ratings, ensuring that recommendations are tailored to individual researchers' interests. To further enhance the user experience, Scholar Inbox also offers a map of science that provides an overview of research across domains, enabling users to easily explore specific topics. We use this map to address the cold start problem common in recommender systems, as well as an active learning strategy that iteratively prompts users to rate a selection of papers, allowing the system to learn user preferences quickly. We evaluate the quality of our recommendation system on a novel dataset of 800k user ratings, which we make publicly available, as well as via an extensive user study. https://www.scholar-inbox.com/
C-TLSAN: Content-Enhanced Time-Aware Long- and Short-Term Attention Network for Personalized Recommendation
Liang, Siqi, Zhang, Yudi, Wang, Yubo
Sequential recommender systems aim to model users' evolving preferences by capturing patterns in their historical interactions. Recent advances in this area have leveraged deep neural networks and attention mechanisms to effectively represent sequential behaviors and time-sensitive interests. In this work, we propose C-TLSAN (Content-Enhanced Time-Aware Long- and Short-Term Attention Network), an extension of the TLSAN architecture that jointly models long- and short-term user preferences while incorporating semantic content associated with items, such as product descriptions. C-TLSAN enriches the recommendation pipeline by embedding textual content linked to users' historical interactions directly into both long-term and short-term attention layers. This allows the model to learn from both behavioral patterns and rich item content, enhancing user and item representations across temporal dimensions. By fusing sequential signals with textual semantics, our approach improves the expressiveness and personalization capacity of recommendation systems. We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale Amazon datasets, benchmarking C-TLSAN against state-of-the-art baselines, including recent sequential recommenders based on Large Language Models (LLMs), which represent interaction history and predictions in text form. Empirical results demonstrate that C-TLSAN consistently outperforms strong baselines in next-item prediction tasks. Notably, it improves AUC by 1.66%, Recall@10 by 93.99%, and Precision@10 by 94.80% on average over the best-performing baseline (TLSAN) across 10 Amazon product categories. These results highlight the value of integrating content-aware enhancements into temporal modeling frameworks for sequential recommendation. Our code is available at https://github.com/booml247/cTLSAN.
Liverpool is crypto capital of UK, survey finds
The city's most famous sons may have sung that money can't buy you love, but that was before bitcoin existed. Liverpool has emerged as the crypto capital of the UK, according to a study looking at the online habits of people across the country. The survey, conducted by telecommunications company Openreach, found that 13% of respondents from Liverpool regularly invest in cryptocurrency and check stocks, more than anywhere else in Britain. Different cities across the UK proved to be hotspots for various activities. London seems to be the online dating capital of Britain, with 24% of respondents saying they engage with dating apps on at least three days a week.
Learn to Preserve Personality: Federated Foundation Models in Recommendations
Li, Zhiwei, Long, Guodong, Zhang, Chunxu, Zhang, Honglei, Jiang, Jing, Zhang, Chengqi
A core learning challenge for existed Foundation Models (FM) is striking the tradeoff between generalization with personalization, which is a dilemma that has been highlighted by various parameter-efficient adaptation techniques. Federated foundation models (FFM) provide a structural means to decouple shared knowledge from individual specific adaptations via decentralized processes. Recommendation systems offer a perfect testbed for FFMs, given their reliance on rich implicit feedback reflecting unique user characteristics. This position paper discusses a novel learning paradigm where FFMs not only harness their generalization capabilities but are specifically designed to preserve the integrity of user personality, illustrated thoroughly within the recommendation contexts. We envision future personal agents, powered by personalized adaptive FMs, guiding user decisions on content. Such an architecture promises a user centric, decentralized system where individuals maintain control over their personalized agents.
Jennie Garth claims ex-husband Peter Facinelli's dating app age range matched their daughter's
Jennie Garth told Fox News Digital that once her youngest child graduates from high school, she will be moving out of California. Jennie Garth is bringing up ex-Peter Facinelli's dating past, specifically about his time on the exclusive celebrity dating app, Raya. During a podcast interview, Garth, 53, claimed that the actor's age range was close to their eldest daughter, Luca, who is now 27. "My ex-husband Peter, I was told, was on Raya, and his age, whatever range, that he was looking for was also the age range of his oldest daughter," Garth shared on the "I Do, Part 2" podcast with Jana Kramer and guest J.P. Rosenbaum. "So, she came across him on her thing."
LightKG: Efficient Knowledge-Aware Recommendations with Simplified GNN Architecture
Li, Yanhui, Wang, Dongxia, Sun, Zhu, Zhang, Haonan, Guo, Huizhong
Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become the dominant approach for Knowledge Graph-aware Recommender Systems (KGRSs) due to their proven effectiveness. Building upon GNN-based KGRSs, Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has been incorporated to address the sparity issue, leading to longer training time. However, through extensive experiments, we reveal that: (1)compared to other KGRSs, the existing GNN-based KGRSs fail to keep their superior performance under sparse interactions even with SSL. (2) More complex models tend to perform worse in sparse interaction scenarios and complex mechanisms, like attention mechanism, can be detrimental as they often increase learning difficulty. Inspired by these findings, we propose LightKG, a simple yet powerful GNN-based KGRS to address sparsity issues. LightKG includes a simplified GNN layer that encodes directed relations as scalar pairs rather than dense embeddings and employs a linear aggregation framework, greatly reducing the complexity of GNNs. Additionally, LightKG incorporates an efficient contrastive layer to implement SSL. It directly minimizes the node similarity in original graph, avoiding the time-consuming subgraph generation and comparison required in previous SSL methods. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that LightKG outperforms 12 competitive KGRSs in both sparse and dense scenarios while significantly reducing training time. Specifically, it surpasses the best baselines by an average of 5.8\% in recommendation accuracy and saves 84.3\% of training time compared to KGRSs with SSL. Our code is available at https://github.com/1371149/LightKG.
Contrastive Matrix Completion with Denoising and Augmented Graph Views for Robust Recommendation
Nemati, Narges, Chehreghani, Mostafa Haghir
Matrix completion is a widely adopted framework in recommender systems, as predicting the missing entries in the user-item rating matrix enables a comprehensive understanding of user preferences. However, current graph neural network (GNN)-based approaches are highly sensitive to noisy or irrelevant edges--due to their inherent message-passing mechanisms--and are prone to overfitting, which limits their generalizability. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel method called Matrix Completion using Contrastive Learning (MCCL). Our approach begins by extracting local neighborhood subgraphs for each interaction and subsequently generates two distinct graph representations. The first representation emphasizes denoising by integrating GNN layers with an attention mechanism, while the second is obtained via a graph variational autoencoder that aligns the feature distribution with a standard prior. A mutual learning loss function is employed during training to gradually harmonize these representations, enabling the model to capture common patterns and significantly enhance its generalizability. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach not only improves the numerical accuracy of the predicted scores--achieving up to a 0.8% improvement in RMSE--but also produces superior rankings with improvements of up to 36% in ranking metrics.
MoE-MLoRA for Multi-Domain CTR Prediction: Efficient Adaptation with Expert Specialization
Yaggel, Ken, German, Eyal, Tov, Aviel Ben Siman
Personalized recommendation systems must adapt to user interactions across different domains. Traditional approaches like MLoRA apply a single adaptation per domain but lack flexibility in handling diverse user behaviors. To address this, we propose MoE-MLoRA, a mixture-of-experts framework where each expert is first trained independently to specialize in its domain before a gating network is trained to weight their contributions dynamically. We evaluate MoE-MLoRA across eight CTR models on Movielens and Taobao, showing that it improves performance in large-scale, dynamic datasets (+1.45 Weighed-AUC in Taobao-20) but offers limited benefits in structured datasets with low domain diversity and sparsity. Further analysis of the number of experts per domain reveals that larger ensembles do not always improve performance, indicating the need for model-aware tuning. Our findings highlight the potential of expert-based architectures for multi-domain recommendation systems, demonstrating that task-aware specialization and adaptive gating can enhance predictive accuracy in complex environments. The implementation and code are available in our GitHub repository.
PersonaLens: A Benchmark for Personalization Evaluation in Conversational AI Assistants
Zhao, Zheng, Vania, Clara, Kayal, Subhradeep, Khan, Naila, Cohen, Shay B., Yilmaz, Emine
Large language models (LLMs) have advanced conversational AI assistants. However, systematically evaluating how well these assistants apply personalization--adapting to individual user preferences while completing tasks--remains challenging. Existing personalization benchmarks focus on chit-chat, non-conversational tasks, or narrow domains, failing to capture the complexities of personalized task-oriented assistance. To address this, we introduce PersonaLens, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating personalization in task-oriented AI assistants. Our benchmark features diverse user profiles equipped with rich preferences and interaction histories, along with two specialized LLM-based agents: a user agent that engages in realistic task-oriented dialogues with AI assistants, and a judge agent that employs the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm to assess personalization, response quality, and task success. Through extensive experiments with current LLM assistants across diverse tasks, we reveal significant variability in their personalization capabilities, providing crucial insights for advancing conversational AI systems.