Tencent Advertising Algorithm Challenge 2025: All-Modality Generative RecommendationJunwei Pan, Wei Xue, Chao Zhou et al.
Generative recommender systems are rapidly emerging as a new paradigm for recommendation, where collaborative identifiers and/or multi-modal content are mapped into discrete token spaces and user behavior is modelled with autoregressive sequence models. Despite progress on multi-modal recommendation datasets, there is still a lack of public benchmarks that jointly offer large-scale, realistic and fully all-modality data designed specifically for generative recommendation (GR) in industrial advertising. To foster research in this direction, we organised the Tencent Advertising Algorithm Challenge 2025, a global competition built on top of two all-modality datasets for GR: TencentGR-1M and TencentGR-10M. Both datasets are constructed from real de-identified Tencent Ads logs and contain rich collaborative IDs and multi-modal representations extracted with state-of-the-art embedding models. The preliminary track (TencentGR-1M) provides 1 million user sequences with up to 100 interacted items each, where each interaction is labeled with exposure and click signals, while the final track (TencentGR-10M) scales this to 10 million users and explicitly distinguishes between click and conversion events at both the sequence and target level. This paper presents the task definition, data construction process, feature schema, baseline GR model, evaluation protocol, and key findings from top-ranked and award-winning solutions. Our datasets focus on multi-modal sequence generation in an advertising setting and introduce weighted evaluation for high-value conversion events. We release our datasets at https://huggingface.co/datasets/TAAC2025 and baseline implementations at https://github.com/TencentAdvertisingAlgorithmCompetition/baseline_2025 to enable future research on all-modality generative recommendation at an industrial scale. The official website is https://algo.qq.com/2025.
Intelligent Electric Vehicle Charging Recommendation Based on Multi-Agent Reinforcement LearningWeijia Zhang, Hao Liu, Fan Wang et al.
Electric Vehicle (EV) has become a preferable choice in the modern transportation system due to its environmental and energy sustainability. However, in many large cities, EV drivers often fail to find the proper spots for charging, because of the limited charging infrastructures and the spatiotemporally unbalanced charging demands. Indeed, the recent emergence of deep reinforcement learning provides great potential to improve the charging experience from various aspects over a long-term horizon. In this paper, we propose a framework, named Multi-Agent Spatio-Temporal Reinforcement Learning (Master), for intelligently recommending public accessible charging stations by jointly considering various long-term spatiotemporal factors. Specifically, by regarding each charging station as an individual agent, we formulate this problem as a multi-objective multi-agent reinforcement learning task. We first develop a multi-agent actor-critic framework with the centralized attentive critic to coordinate the recommendation between geo-distributed agents. Moreover, to quantify the influence of future potential charging competition, we introduce a delayed access strategy to exploit the knowledge of future charging competition during training. After that, to effectively optimize multiple learning objectives, we extend the centralized attentive critic to multi-critics and develop a dynamic gradient re-weighting strategy to adaptively guide the optimization direction. Finally, extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that Master achieves the best comprehensive performance compared with nine baseline approaches.
Out-of-Town Recommendation with Travel Intention ModelingHaoran Xin, Xinjiang Lu, Tong Xu et al.
Out-of-town recommendation is designed for those users who leave their home-town areas and visit the areas they have never been to before. It is challenging to recommend Point-of-Interests (POIs) for out-of-town users since the out-of-town check-in behavior is determined by not only the user's home-town preference but also the user's travel intention. Besides, the user's travel intentions are complex and dynamic, which leads to big difficulties in understanding such intentions precisely. In this paper, we propose a TRAvel-INtention-aware Out-of-town Recommendation framework, named TRAINOR. The proposed TRAINOR framework distinguishes itself from existing out-of-town recommenders in three aspects. First, graph neural networks are explored to represent users' home-town check-in preference and geographical constraints in out-of-town check-in behaviors. Second, a user-specific travel intention is formulated as an aggregation combining home-town preference and generic travel intention together, where the generic travel intention is regarded as a mixture of inherent intentions that can be learned by Neural Topic Model (NTM). Third, a non-linear mapping function, as well as a matrix factorization method, are employed to transfer users' home-town preference and estimate out-of-town POI's representation, respectively. Extensive experiments on real-world data sets validate the effectiveness of the TRAINOR framework. Moreover, the learned travel intention can deliver meaningful explanations for understanding a user's travel purposes.