Music recommender systems frequently utilize network-based models to capture relationships between music pieces, artists, and users. Although these relationships provide valuable insights for predictions, new music pieces or artists often face the cold-start problem due to insufficient initial information. To address this, one can extract content-based information directly from the music to enhance collaborative-filtering-based methods. While previous approaches have relied on hand-crafted audio features for this purpose, we explore the use of contrastively pretrained neural audio embedding models, which offer a richer and more nuanced representation of music. Our experiments demonstrate that neural embeddings, particularly those generated with the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) model, present a promising approach to enhancing music recommendation tasks within graph-based frameworks.

Intent is a significant latent factor influencing user-item interaction sequences. Prevalent sequence recommendation models that utilize contrastive learning predominantly rely on single-intent representations to direct the training process. However, this paradigm oversimplifies real-world recommendation scenarios, attempting to encapsulate the diversity of intents within the single-intent level representation. SR models considering multi-intent information in their framework are more likely to reflect real-life recommendation scenarios accurately. To this end, we propose a Multi-intent Aware Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (MCLRec). It integrates an intent-aware user representation learning method to enable multi-intent recognition within interaction sequences through the spatial relationships between user and intent representations. We further propose a multi-intent aware contrastive learning strategy to mitigate the impact of pair-wise representations with high similarity. Experimental results on widely used four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for sequential recommendation.

Using a single tool to build and compare recommender systems significantly reduces the time to market for new models. In addition, the comparison results when using such tools look more consistent. This is why many different tools and libraries for researchers in the field of recommendations have recently appeared. Unfortunately, most of these frameworks are aimed primarily at researchers and require modification for use in production due to the inability to work on large datasets or an inappropriate architecture. In this demo, we present our open-source toolkit RePlay - a framework containing an end-to-end pipeline for building recommender systems, which is ready for production use. RePlay also allows you to use a suitable stack for the pipeline on each stage: Pandas, Polars, or Spark. This allows the library to scale computations and deploy to a cluster. Thus, RePlay allows data scientists to easily move from research mode to production mode using the same interfaces.

In today's world of globalized commerce, cross-market recommendation systems (CMRs) are crucial for providing personalized user experiences across diverse market segments. However, traditional recommendation algorithms have difficulties dealing with market specificity and data sparsity, especially in new or emerging markets. In this paper, we propose the CrossGR model, which utilizes Graph Isomorphism Networks (GINs) to improve CMR systems. It outperforms existing benchmarks in NDCG@10 and HR@10 metrics, demonstrating its adaptability and accuracy in handling diverse market segments. The CrossGR model is adaptable and accurate, making it well-suited for handling the complexities of cross-market recommendation tasks. Its robustness is demonstrated by consistent performance across different evaluation timeframes, indicating its potential to cater to evolving market trends and user preferences. Our findings suggest that GINs represent a promising direction for CMRs, paving the way for more sophisticated, personalized, and context-aware recommendation systems in the dynamic landscape of global e-commerce.

As global tourism expands and artificial intelligence technology advances, intelligent travel planning services have emerged as a significant research focus. Within dynamic real-world travel scenarios with multi-dimensional constraints, services that support users in automatically creating practical and customized travel itineraries must address three key objectives: Rationality, Comprehensiveness, and Personalization. However, existing systems with rule-based combinations or LLM-based planning methods struggle to fully satisfy these criteria. To overcome the challenges, we introduce TravelAgent, a travel planning system powered by large language models (LLMs) designed to provide reasonable, comprehensive, and personalized travel itineraries grounded in dynamic scenarios. TravelAgent comprises four modules: Tool-usage, Recommendation, Planning, and Memory Module. We evaluate TravelAgent's performance with human and simulated users, demonstrating its overall effectiveness in three criteria and confirming the accuracy of personalized recommendations.

Accurate prediction of temporal QoS is crucial for maintaining service reliability and enhancing user satisfaction in dynamic service-oriented environments. However, current methods often neglect high-order latent collaborative relationships and fail to dynamically adjust feature learning for specific user-service invocations, which are critical for precise feature extraction within each time slice. Moreover, the prevalent use of RNNs for modeling temporal feature evolution patterns is constrained by their inherent difficulty in managing long-range dependencies, thereby limiting the detection of long-term QoS trends across multiple time slices. These shortcomings dramatically degrade the performance of temporal QoS prediction. To address the two issues, we propose a novel Graph Attention Collaborative Learning (GACL) framework for temporal QoS prediction. Building on a dynamic user-service invocation graph to comprehensively model historical interactions, it designs a target-prompt graph attention network to extract deep latent features of users and services at each time slice, considering implicit target-neighboring collaborative relationships and historical QoS values. Additionally, a multi-layer Transformer encoder is introduced to uncover temporal feature evolution patterns, enhancing temporal QoS prediction. Extensive experiments on the WS-DREAM dataset demonstrate that GACL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for temporal QoS prediction across multiple evaluation metrics, achieving the improvements of up to 38.80%.

E-commerce platforms have a vast catalog of items to cater to their customers' shopping interests. Most of these platforms assist their customers in the shopping process by offering optimized recommendation carousels, designed to help customers quickly locate their desired items. Many models have been proposed in academic literature to generate and enhance the ranking and recall set of items in these carousels. Conventionally, the accompanying carousel title text (header) of these carousels remains static. In most instances, a generic text such as "Items similar to your current viewing" is utilized. Fixed variations such as the inclusion of specific attributes "Other items from a similar seller" or "Items from a similar brand" in addition to "frequently bought together" or "considered together" are observed as well. This work proposes a novel approach to customize the header generation process of these carousels. Our work leverages user-generated reviews that lay focus on specific attributes (aspects) of an item that were favorably perceived by users during their interaction with the given item. We extract these aspects from reviews and train a graph neural network-based model under the framework of a conditional ranking task. We refer to our innovative methodology as Dynamic Text Snippets (DTS) which generates multiple header texts for an anchor item and its recall set. Our approach demonstrates the potential of utilizing user-generated reviews and presents a unique paradigm for exploring increasingly context-aware recommendation systems.

Collaborative filtering (CF) remains essential in recommender systems, leveraging user--item interactions to provide personalized recommendations. Meanwhile, a number of CF techniques have evolved into sophisticated model architectures based on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). However, MLPs often suffer from catastrophic forgetting, and thus lose previously acquired knowledge when new information is learned, particularly in dynamic environments requiring continual learning. To tackle this problem, we propose CF-KAN, a new CF method utilizing Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs). By learning nonlinear functions on the edge level, KANs are more robust to the catastrophic forgetting problem than MLPs. Built upon a KAN-based autoencoder, CF-KAN is designed in the sense of effectively capturing the intricacies of sparse user--item interactions and retaining information from previous data instances. Despite its simplicity, our extensive experiments demonstrate 1) CF-KAN's superiority over state-of-the-art methods in recommendation accuracy, 2) CF-KAN's resilience to catastrophic forgetting, underscoring its effectiveness in both static and dynamic recommendation scenarios, and 3) CF-KAN's edge-level interpretation facilitating the explainability of recommendations.

In this effort, we propose using the Mamba for handling tabular data in personalized recommendation systems. We present the \textit{FT-Mamba} (Feature Tokenizer\,$+$\,Mamba), a novel hybrid model that replaces Transformer layers with Mamba layers within the FT-Transformer architecture, for handling tabular data in personalized recommendation systems. The \textit{Mamba model} offers an efficient alternative to Transformers, reducing computational complexity from quadratic to linear by enhancing the capabilities of State Space Models (SSMs). FT-Mamba is designed to improve the scalability and efficiency of recommendation systems while maintaining performance. We evaluate FT-Mamba in comparison to a traditional Transformer-based model within a Two-Tower architecture on three datasets: Spotify music recommendation, H\&M fashion recommendation, and vaccine messaging recommendation. Each model is trained on 160,000 user-action pairs, and performance is measured using precision (P), recall (R), Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), and Hit Ratio (HR) at several truncation values. Our results demonstrate that FT-Mamba outperforms the Transformer-based model in terms of computational efficiency while maintaining or exceeding performance across key recommendation metrics. By leveraging Mamba layers, FT-Mamba provides a scalable and effective solution for large-scale personalized recommendation systems, showcasing the potential of the Mamba architecture to enhance both efficiency and accuracy.

Google lost its final legal challenge on Tuesday against a European Union penalty for giving its own shopping recommendations an illegal advantage over rivals in search results, ending a long-running antitrust case that came with a whopping fine. The European Union's Court of Justice upheld a lower court's decision, rejecting the company's appeal against the 2.4 billion euro ( 2.7 billion) penalty from the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc's top antitrust enforcer. "By today's judgment, the Court of Justice dismisses the appeal and thus upholds the judgment of the General Court," the court said in a press release summarizing its decision. The commission's original decision in 2017 accused the Silicon Valley giant of unfairly directing visitors to its own Google Shopping service to the detriment of competitors. It was one of three multibillion-euro fines that the commission imposed on Google in the previous decade as Brussels started ramping up its crackdown on the tech industry.