Bohao Wang

Bohao Wang, Feng Liu, Changwang Zhang et al.

Sequential Recommenders generate recommendations based on users' historical interaction sequences. However, in practice, these collected sequences are often contaminated by noisy interactions, which significantly impairs recommendation performance. Accurately identifying such noisy interactions without additional information is particularly challenging due to the absence of explicit supervisory signals indicating noise. Large Language Models (LLMs), equipped with extensive open knowledge and semantic reasoning abilities, offer a promising avenue to bridge this information gap. However, employing LLMs for denoising in sequential recommendation presents notable challenges: 1) Direct application of pretrained LLMs may not be competent for the denoising task, frequently generating nonsensical responses; 2) Even after fine-tuning, the reliability of LLM outputs remains questionable, especially given the complexity of the denoising task and the inherent hallucinatory issue of LLMs. To tackle these challenges, we propose LLM4DSR, a tailored approach for denoising sequential recommendation using LLMs. We constructed a self-supervised fine-tuning task to activate LLMs' capabilities to identify noisy items and suggest replacements. Furthermore, we developed an uncertainty estimation module that ensures only high-confidence responses are utilized for sequence corrections. Remarkably, LLM4DSR is model-agnostic, allowing corrected sequences to be flexibly applied across various recommendation models. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of LLM4DSR over existing methods.

Heng Tang, Feng Liu, Xinbo Chen et al.

Recent years have witnessed extensive exploration of Large Language Models (LLMs) on the field of Recommender Systems (RS). There are currently two commonly used strategies to enable LLMs to have recommendation capabilities: 1) The "Guidance-Only" strategy uses in-context learning to exploit and amplify the inherent semantic understanding and item recommendation capabilities of LLMs; 2) The "Tuning-Only" strategy uses supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to fine-tune LLMs with the aim of fitting them to real recommendation data. However, neither of these strategies can effectively bridge the gap between the knowledge space of LLMs and recommendation, and their performance do not meet our expectations. To better enable LLMs to learn recommendation knowledge, we combine the advantages of the above two strategies and proposed a novel "Guidance+Tuning" method called Self-Optimized Fine-Tuning (SOFT), which adopts the idea of curriculum learning. It first employs self-distillation to construct an auxiliary easy-to-learn but meaningful dataset from a fine-tuned LLM. Then it further utilizes a self-adaptive curriculum scheduler to enable LLMs to gradually learn from simpler data (self-distilled data) to more challenging data (real RS data). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SOFT significantly enhances the recommendation accuracy (37.59\% on average) of LLM-based methods. The code is available via https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Self-Optimized-Fine-Tuning-264E

Zhengxu Tang, Zizheng Wang, Luning Wang et al.

Text-to-video (T2V) generation models have made significant progress in creating visually appealing videos. However, they struggle with generating coherent sequential narratives that require logical progression through multiple events. Existing T2V benchmarks primarily focus on visual quality metrics but fail to evaluate narrative coherence over extended sequences. To bridge this gap, we present SeqBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating sequential narrative coherence in T2V generation. SeqBench includes a carefully designed dataset of 320 prompts spanning various narrative complexities, with 2,560 human-annotated videos generated from 8 state-of-the-art T2V models. Additionally, we design a Dynamic Temporal Graphs (DTG)-based automatic evaluation metric, which can efficiently capture long-range dependencies and temporal ordering while maintaining computational efficiency. Our DTG-based metric demonstrates a strong correlation with human annotations. Through systematic evaluation using SeqBench, we reveal critical limitations in current T2V models: failure to maintain consistent object states across multi-action sequences, physically implausible results in multi-object scenarios, and difficulties in preserving realistic timing and ordering relationships between sequential actions. SeqBench provides the first systematic framework for evaluating narrative coherence in T2V generation and offers concrete insights for improving sequential reasoning capabilities in future models. Please refer to https://videobench.github.io/SeqBench.github.io/ for more details.