Personal Assistant Systems
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A Details of the empirical setup in Section 3.4
Our model is one of the simplest possible that studies specialization in the supply-side marketplace. First, the infinite, high-dimensional content embedding space captures that digital goods can't be cleanly clustered into categories, but rather, are often mixtures of different dimensions (e.g. a movie can be both a drama and a comedy). See Anderson et al. [ 1992 ] for a textbook treatment. The assumption that all producers share the same cost function is also simplifying, but, potentially surprisingly, still allows us to study specialization. Proposition 4. F or any set of users and any 1, a pure strategy equilibrium does not exist.
A Related Work .
Semantic IDs created using an auto-encoder (RQ-V AE [40, 21]) for retrieval models. We refer to V ector Quantization as the process of converting a high-dimensional vector into a low-dimensional tuple of codewords. We discuss this technique in more detail in Subsection 3.1. We use users' review history During training, we limit the number of items in a user's history to 20. The results for this dataset are reported in Table 7 as the row'P5'.
How to model Human Actions distribution with Event Sequence Data
Surkov, Egor, Osin, Dmitry, Burnaev, Evgeny, Shvetsov, Egor
This paper studies forecasting of the future distribution of events in human action sequences, a task essential in domains like retail, finance, healthcare, and recommendation systems where the precise temporal order is often less critical than the set of outcomes. We challenge the dominant autoregressive paradigm and investigate whether explicitly modeling the future distribution or order-invariant multi-token approaches outperform order-preserving methods. We analyze local order invariance and introduce a KL-based metric to quantify temporal drift. We find that a simple explicit distribution forecasting objective consistently surpasses complex implicit baselines. We further demonstrate that mode collapse of predicted categories is primarily driven by distributional imbalance. This work provides a principled framework for selecting modeling strategies and offers practical guidance for building more accurate and robust forecasting systems. In many real-world prediction tasks, the precise temporal ordering of events is irrelevant. Instead, predicting the distribution of outcomes, where only the presence or absence of specific elements matters, is sufficient and often more practical. For instance, in retail operations, probabilistic demand forecasting enables optimal inventory management and supply chain planning by modeling the full range of possible product demands without requiring sequence order (Nassibi et al., 2023; Larson, 2001).
Catalog-Native LLM: Speaking Item-ID Dialect with Less Entanglement for Recommendation
Shirkavand, Reza, Wei, Xiaokai, Wang, Chen, Hui, Zheng, Huang, Heng, Gong, Michelle
While collaborative filtering delivers predictive accuracy and efficiency, and Large Language Models (LLMs) enable expressive and generalizable reasoning, modern recommendation systems must bring these strengths together. Growing user expectations, such as natural-language queries and transparent explanations, further highlight the need for a unified approach. However, doing so is nontrivial. Collaborative signals are often token-efficient but semantically opaque, while LLMs are semantically rich but struggle to model implicit user preferences when trained only on textual inputs. This paper introduces Item-ID + Oral-language Mixture-of-Experts Language Model (IDIOMoE), which treats item interaction histories as a native dialect within the language space, enabling collaborative signals to be understood in the same way as natural language. By splitting the Feed Forward Network of each block of a pretrained LLM into a separate text expert and an item expert with token-type gating, our method avoids destructive interference between text and catalog modalities. IDIOMoE demonstrates strong recommendation performance across both public and proprietary datasets, while preserving the text understanding of the pretrained model.
FedFlex: Federated Learning for Diverse Netflix Recommendations
Lankester, Sven, Bertoli, Gustavo de Carvalho, Vizcaino, Matias, Aussalet, Emmanuelle Beauxis, Slokom, Manel
The drive for personalization in recommender systems creates a tension between user privacy and the risk of "filter bubbles". Although federated learning offers a promising paradigm for privacy-preserving recommendations, its impact on diversity remains unclear. We introduce FedFlex, a two-stage framework that combines local, on-device fine-tuning of matrix factorization models (SVD and BPR) with a lightweight Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) re-ranking step to promote diversity. We conducted the first live user study of a federated recommender, collecting behavioral data and feedback during a two-week online deployment. Our results show that FedFlex successfully engages users, with BPR outperforming SVD in click-through rate. Re-ranking with MMR consistently improved ranking quality (nDCG) across both models, with statistically significant gains, particularly for BPR. Diversity effects varied: MMR increased coverage for both models and improved intra-list diversity for BPR, but slightly reduced it for SVD, suggesting different interactions between personalization and diversification across models. Our exit questionnaire responses indicated that most users expressed no clear preference between re-ranked and unprocessed lists, implying that increased diversity did not substantially reduce user satisfaction.