The scarcity of realistic datasets poses a significant challenge in benchmarking recommender systems and social network analysis methods and techniques. A common and effective solution is to generate synthetic data that simulates realistic interactions. However, although various methods have been proposed, the existing literature still lacks generators that are fully adaptable and allow easy manipulation of the underlying data distributions and structural properties. To address this issue, the present work introduces GenRec, a novel framework for generating synthetic user-item interactions that exhibit realistic and well-known properties observed in recommendation scenarios. The framework is based on a stochastic generative process based on latent factor modeling. Here, the latent factors can be exploited to yield long-tailed preference distributions, and at the same time they characterize subpopulations of users and topic-based item clusters. Notably, the proposed framework is highly flexible and offers a wide range of hyper-parameters for customizing the generation of user-item interactions. The code used to perform the experiments is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GenRec-DED3.

Recent advancements have showcased the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in executing reasoning tasks, particularly facilitated by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. While tasks like arithmetic reasoning involve clear, definitive answers and logical chains of thought, the application of LLM reasoning in recommendation systems (RecSys) presents a distinct challenge. RecSys tasks revolve around subjectivity and personalized preferences, an under-explored domain in utilizing LLMs' reasoning capabilities. Our study explores several aspects to better understand reasoning for RecSys and demonstrate how task quality improves by utilizing LLM reasoning in both zero-shot and finetuning settings. Additionally, we propose RecSAVER (Recommender Systems Automatic Verification and Evaluation of Reasoning) to automatically assess the quality of LLM reasoning responses without the requirement of curated gold references or human raters. We show that our framework aligns with real human judgment on the coherence and faithfulness of reasoning responses. Overall, our work shows that incorporating reasoning into RecSys can improve personalized tasks, paving the way for further advancements in recommender system methodologies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have become an indispensable component of modern technology. However, research on human behavioral responses is lagging behind, i.e., the research into human reliance on AI advice (AI reliance). Current shortcomings in the literature include the unclear influences on AI reliance, lack of external validity, conflicting approaches to measuring reliance, and disregard for a change in reliance over time. Promising avenues for future research include reliance on generative AI output and reliance in multi-user situations. In conclusion, we present a morphological box that serves as a guide for research on AI reliance.

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON KNOWLEDGE AND DA T A ENGINEERING 1 Dual Test-time Training for Out-of-distribution Recommender System Xihong Y ang, Yiqi Wang, Jin Chen, Wenqi Fan, Xiangyu Zhao, En Zhu, Xinwang Liu, Senior Member, IEEE, Defu Lian Abstract --Deep learning has been widely applied in rec-ommender systems, which has recently achieved revolutionary progress. However, most existing learning-based methods assume that the user and item distributions remain unchanged between the training phase and the test phase. However, the distribution of user and item features can naturally shift in real-world scenarios, potentially resulting in a substantial decrease in recommendation performance. This phenomenon can be formulated as an Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) recommendation problem. T o address this challenge, we propose a novel Dual Test-Time-Training framework for OOD Recommendation, termed DT3OR. In DT3OR, we incorporate a model adaptation mechanism during the test-time phase to carefully update the recommendation model, allowing the model to adapt specially to the shifting user and item features. T o be specific, we propose a self-distillation task and a contrastive task to assist the model learning both the user's invariant interest preferences and the variant user/item characteristics during the test-time phase, thus facilitating a smooth adaptation to the shifting features. Furthermore, we provide theoretical analysis to support the rationale behind our dual test-time training framework. T o the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to address OOD recommendation via a test-time-training strategy. We conduct experiments on five datasets with various backbones. Comprehensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of DT3OR compared to other state-of-the-art baselines. I NTRODUCTION R ECOMMENDER systems play a crucial role in alleviating the information overload on social media platforms by providing personalized information filtering. In recent years, a plethora of recommendation algorithms have been proposed, including collaborative filtering [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], graph-based recommendation [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], cross-domain recommendation [15], [16], [17], [18] and etc. X. Y ang, Y . Wang, X. Liu and E. Zhu are with School of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China. J. Chen is with School of Business and Management of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. W . Fan is with the Department of Computing (COMP) and Department of Management and Markering (MM), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Advanced digital assistants can significantly enhance task performance, reduce user burden, and provide personalized guidance to improve users' abilities. However, the development of such intelligent digital assistants presents a formidable challenge. To address this, we introduce TOM, a conceptual architecture and software platform (https://github.com/TOM-Platform) designed to support the development of intelligent wearable assistants that are contextually aware of both the user and the environment. This system was developed collaboratively with AR/MR researchers, HCI researchers, AI/Robotic researchers, and software developers, and it continues to evolve to meet the diverse requirements of these stakeholders. TOM facilitates the creation of intelligent assistive AR applications for daily activities and supports the recording and analysis of user interactions, integration of new devices, and the provision of assistance for various activities. Additionally, we showcase several proof-of-concept assistive services and discuss the challenges involved in developing such services.

Factorization machine (FM) variants are widely used in recommendation systems that operate under strict throughput and latency requirements, such as online advertising systems. FMs are known both due to their ability to model pairwise feature interactions while being resilient to data sparsity, and their computational graphs that facilitate fast inference and training. Moreover, when items are ranked as a part of a query for each incoming user, these graphs facilitate computing the portion stemming from the user and context fields only once per query. Consequently, in terms of inference cost, the number of user or context fields is practically unlimited. More advanced FM variants, such as FwFM, provide better accuracy by learning a representation of field-wise interactions, but require computing all pairwise interaction terms explicitly. The computational cost during inference is proportional to the square of the number of fields, including user, context, and item. When the number of fields is large, this is prohibitive in systems with strict latency constraints. To mitigate this caveat, heuristic pruning of low intensity field interactions is commonly used to accelerate inference. In this work we propose an alternative to the pruning heuristic in FwFMs using a diagonal plus symmetric low-rank decomposition. Our technique reduces the computational cost of inference, by allowing it to be proportional to the number of item fields only. Using a set of experiments on real-world datasets, we show that aggressive rank reduction outperforms similarly aggressive pruning, both in terms of accuracy and item recommendation speed. We corroborate our claim of faster inference experimentally, both via a synthetic test, and by having deployed our solution to a major online advertising system. The code to reproduce our experimental results is at https://github.com/michaelviderman/pytorch-fm/tree/dev.

One thing seems for sure: people are not ready for "digital workers" just yet. That's the lesson learned by Sarah Franklin, the CEO of Lattice, a human resources and performance management platform that offers performance coaching, talent reviews, onboarding automation, compensation management and a host of other HR tools to more than 5,000 organizations around the world. What is a digital employee? According to Franklin, it's avatars like Devin the engineer, Harvey the lawyer, Einstein the service agent and Piper the sales agent who have "entered the workforce and become our colleagues". But these are not real workers.

But the days of deliberating whether or not to include your friends, dogs, or selfies in your dating app profile could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to Tinder. The dating app has released a new tool called'Photo Selector', which uses AI to choose the best photos for your dating profile. 'By alleviating the burden of photo selection, Photo Selector empowers users to focus more on making meaningful connections rather than spending excessive time on photo selection,' Tinder explained. 'This AI innovation promises to inject more spontaneity into the online dating experience.' Tinder has released a new tool called'Photo Selector', which uses AI to choose the best photos for your dating profile To use the tool, open the Tinder app and select'Add media' on your profile. First, you'll be prompted to upload a photo of yourself, or take a selfie.

User interests can be viewed over different time scales, mainly including stable long-term preferences and changing short-term intentions, and their combination facilitates the comprehensive sequential recommendation. However, existing work that focuses on different time scales of user modeling has ignored the negative effects of different time-scale noise, which hinders capturing actual user interests and cannot be resolved by conventional sequential denoising methods. In this paper, we propose a Long- and Short-term Interest Denoising Network (LSIDN), which employs different encoders and tailored denoising strategies to extract long- and short-term interests, respectively, achieving both comprehensive and robust user modeling. Specifically, we employ a session-level interest extraction and evolution strategy to avoid introducing inter-session behavioral noise into long-term interest modeling; we also adopt contrastive learning equipped with a homogeneous exchanging augmentation to alleviate the impact of unintentional behavioral noise on short-term interest modeling. Results of experiments on two public datasets show that LSIDN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models and achieves significant robustness.

Recommender systems present relevant contents to users and help content creators reach their target audience. The dual nature of these systems influences both users and creators: users' preferences are affected by the items they are recommended, while creators are incentivized to alter their contents such that it is recommended more frequently. We define a model, called user-creator feature dynamics, to capture the dual influences of recommender systems. We prove that a recommender system with dual influence is guaranteed to polarize, causing diversity loss in the system. We then investigate, both theoretically and empirically, approaches for mitigating polarization and promoting diversity in recommender systems. Unexpectedly, we find that common diversity-promoting approaches do not work in the presence of dual influence, while relevancy-optimizing methods like top-$k$ recommendation can prevent polarization and improve diversity of the system.