Kesha Ou

Kesha Ou, Zhen Tian, Wayne Xin Zhao et al.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction holds a pivotal role in online advertising and recommendation systems, where even small improvements can significantly boost revenue. Existing research primarily focuses on designing dual-stream architectures to capture effective complex feature interactions from both explicit and implicit perspectives. However, these approaches are faced with two major challenges: 1) the high complexity of feature interaction learning, which increases computational demands and the overfitting risk, and 2) the imbalance between explicit and implicit modules, where one module's output may dominate the final prediction. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose Dual-Stream MLP (DS-MLP), a novel feature interaction framework for the CTR prediction task. Specially, it leverages knowledge distillation to consolidate the capacity of learning explicit feature interaction into a main MLP network, while a parallel MLP simultaneously captures implicit feature interactions as a complement. To effectively optimize the dual-stream MLP architecture, we further design a specific learning approach with two alignment strategies for enhancing the compatibility of the two MLP components. Experiments demonstrate that DS-MLP, though merely a vanilla MLP structure (the final model), can achieve state-of-the-art performance across three widely used benchmarks, offering a scalable and efficient solution for large-scale recommendation systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/DS-MLP.

Kesha Ou, Chenghao Wu, Xiaolei Wang et al.

The technical foundations of recommender systems have progressed from collaborative filtering to complex neural models and, more recently, large language models. Despite these technological advances, deployed systems often underserve their users by simply presenting a list of items, leaving the burden of exploration, comparison, and synthesis entirely on the user. This paper argues that this traditional "tool-based" paradigm fundamentally limits user experience, as the system acts as a passive filter rather than an active assistant. To address this limitation, we propose a novel deep research paradigm for recommendation, which replaces conventional item lists with comprehensive, user-centric reports. We instantiate this paradigm through RecPilot, a multi-agent framework comprising two core components: a user trajectory simulation agent that autonomously explores the item space, and a self-evolving report generation agent that synthesizes the findings into a coherent, interpretable report tailored to support user decisions. This approach reframes recommendation as a proactive, agent-driven service. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that RecPilot not only achieves strong performance in modeling user behaviors but also generates highly persuasive reports that substantially reduce user effort in item evaluation, validating the potential of this new interaction paradigm.