Jizhi Zhang

Wentao Shi, Jiawei Chen, Fuli Feng et al.

Negative sampling has been heavily used to train recommender models on large-scale data, wherein sampling hard examples usually not only accelerates the convergence but also improves the model accuracy. Nevertheless, the reasons for the effectiveness of Hard Negative Sampling (HNS) have not been revealed yet. In this work, we fill the research gap by conducting thorough theoretical analyses on HNS. Firstly, we prove that employing HNS on the Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) learner is equivalent to optimizing One-way Partial AUC (OPAUC). Concretely, the BPR equipped with Dynamic Negative Sampling (DNS) is an exact estimator, while with softmax-based sampling is a soft estimator. Secondly, we prove that OPAUC has a stronger connection with Top-K evaluation metrics than AUC and verify it with simulation experiments. These analyses establish the theoretical foundation of HNS in optimizing Top-K recommendation performance for the first time. On these bases, we offer two insightful guidelines for effective usage of HNS: 1) the sampling hardness should be controllable, e.g., via pre-defined hyper-parameters, to adapt to different Top-K metrics and datasets; 2) the smaller the $K$ we emphasize in Top-K evaluation metrics, the harder the negative samples we should draw. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks verify the two guidelines.

Chengpeng Li, Zhengyi Yang, Jizhi Zhang et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely applied in recommendation systems due to its potential in optimizing the long-term engagement of users. From the perspective of RL, recommendation can be formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP), where recommendation system (agent) can interact with users (environment) and acquire feedback (reward signals).However, it is impractical to conduct online interactions with the concern on user experience and implementation complexity, and we can only train RL recommenders with offline datasets containing limited reward signals and state transitions. Therefore, the data sparsity issue of reward signals and state transitions is very severe, while it has long been overlooked by existing RL recommenders.Worse still, RL methods learn through the trial-and-error mode, but negative feedback cannot be obtained in implicit feedback recommendation tasks, which aggravates the overestimation problem of offline RL recommender. To address these challenges, we propose a novel RL recommender named model-enhanced contrastive reinforcement learning (MCRL). On the one hand, we learn a value function to estimate the long-term engagement of users, together with a conservative value learning mechanism to alleviate the overestimation problem.On the other hand, we construct some positive and negative state-action pairs to model the reward function and state transition function with contrastive learning to exploit the internal structure information of MDP. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing offline RL and self-supervised RL methods with different representative backbone networks on two real-world datasets.

Xinyu Chen, Yuyi Qian, Jiang Lin et al.

Video object insertion requires ensuring spatio-temporal coherence and interactive realism, extending far beyond simple content placement. However, current approaches are often hindered by a reliance on explicit motion engineering or resource-intensive retraining, restricting their flexibility and generalization. To bridge this gap, we present \textit{SimInsert}, a training-free paradigm that efficiently decouples the task into intuitive single-frame editing and semantic motion description. By harnessing the robust generative priors of image-to-video diffusion models, SimInsert propagates edits temporally, strictly preserving background invariance while enabling plausible, text-driven interactions between the inserted object and the dynamic environment. Our approach hinges on non-invasive guidance mechanisms that enforce structural consistency, facilitate seamless boundary fusion, and counteract the fidelity drift that typically accumulates during the denoising trajectory. Extensive quantitative experiments validate our efficacy: SimInsert surpasses state-of-the-art methods with an 18.8\% gain in PSNR, 20.1\% in SSIM, and a 44.1\% decrease in LPIPS, offering a streamlined solution for high-fidelity video editing.

Wentao Shi, Xiangnan He, Yang Zhang et al.

Planning for both immediate and long-term benefits becomes increasingly important in recommendation. Existing methods apply Reinforcement Learning (RL) to learn planning capacity by maximizing cumulative reward for long-term recommendation. However, the scarcity of recommendation data presents challenges such as instability and susceptibility to overfitting when training RL models from scratch, resulting in sub-optimal performance. In this light, we propose to leverage the remarkable planning capabilities over sparse data of Large Language Models (LLMs) for long-term recommendation. The key to achieving the target lies in formulating a guidance plan following principles of enhancing long-term engagement and grounding the plan to effective and executable actions in a personalized manner. To this end, we propose a Bi-level Learnable LLM Planner framework, which consists of a set of LLM instances and breaks down the learning process into macro-learning and micro-learning to learn macro-level guidance and micro-level personalized recommendation policies, respectively. Extensive experiments validate that the framework facilitates the planning ability of LLMs for long-term recommendation. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/jizhi-zhang/BiLLP.

Yang Zhang, Juntao You, Yimeng Bai et al.

Recent advancements in recommender systems have focused on leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve user preference modeling, yielding promising outcomes. However, current LLM-based approaches struggle to fully leverage user behavior sequences, resulting in suboptimal preference modeling for personalized recommendations. In this study, we propose a novel Counterfactual Fine-Tuning (CFT) method to address this issue by explicitly emphasizing the role of behavior sequences when generating recommendations. Specifically, we employ counterfactual reasoning to identify the causal effects of behavior sequences on model output and introduce a task that directly fits the ground-truth labels based on these effects, achieving the goal of explicit emphasis. Additionally, we develop a token-level weighting mechanism to adjust the emphasis strength for different item tokens, reflecting the diminishing influence of behavior sequences from earlier to later tokens during predicting an item. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that CFT effectively improves behavior sequence modeling. Our codes are available at https://github.com/itsmeyjt/CFT.

Jizhi Zhang, Keqin Bao, Yang Zhang et al.

The remarkable achievements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of a novel recommendation paradigm -- Recommendation via LLM (RecLLM). Nevertheless, it is important to note that LLMs may contain social prejudices, and therefore, the fairness of recommendations made by RecLLM requires further investigation. To avoid the potential risks of RecLLM, it is imperative to evaluate the fairness of RecLLM with respect to various sensitive attributes on the user side. Due to the differences between the RecLLM paradigm and the traditional recommendation paradigm, it is problematic to directly use the fairness benchmark of traditional recommendation. To address the dilemma, we propose a novel benchmark called Fairness of Recommendation via LLM (FaiRLLM). This benchmark comprises carefully crafted metrics and a dataset that accounts for eight sensitive attributes1 in two recommendation scenarios: music and movies. By utilizing our FaiRLLM benchmark, we conducted an evaluation of ChatGPT and discovered that it still exhibits unfairness to some sensitive attributes when generating recommendations. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/jizhi-zhang/FaiRLLM.

Jiang Lin, Xinyu Chen, Song Wu et al.

Controlling the spatial and semantic structure of diffusion-generated images remains a challenge. Existing methods like ControlNet rely on handcrafted condition maps and retraining, limiting flexibility and generalization. Inversion-based approaches offer stronger alignment but incur high inference cost due to dual-path denoising. We present FreeControl, a training-free framework for semantic structural control in diffusion models. Unlike prior methods that extract attention across multiple timesteps, FreeControl performs one-step attention extraction from a single, optimally chosen key timestep and reuses it throughout denoising. This enables efficient structural guidance without inversion or retraining. To further improve quality and stability, we introduce Latent-Condition Decoupling (LCD): a principled separation of the key timestep and the noised latent used in attention extraction. LCD provides finer control over attention quality and eliminates structural artifacts. FreeControl also supports compositional control via reference images assembled from multiple sources - enabling intuitive scene layout design and stronger prompt alignment. FreeControl introduces a new paradigm for test-time control, enabling structurally and semantically aligned, visually coherent generation directly from raw images, with the flexibility for intuitive compositional design and compatibility with modern diffusion models at approximately 5 percent additional cost.

Jizhi Zhang, Keqin Bao, Wenjie Wang et al.

The new kind of Agent-oriented information system, exemplified by GPTs, urges us to inspect the information system infrastructure to support Agent-level information processing and to adapt to the characteristics of Large Language Model (LLM)-based Agents, such as interactivity. In this work, we envisage the prospect of the recommender system on LLM-based Agent platforms and introduce a novel recommendation paradigm called Rec4Agentverse, comprised of Agent Items and Agent Recommender. Rec4Agentverse emphasizes the collaboration between Agent Items and Agent Recommender, thereby promoting personalized information services and enhancing the exchange of information beyond the traditional user-recommender feedback loop. Additionally, we prospect the evolution of Rec4Agentverse and conceptualize it into three stages based on the enhancement of the interaction and information exchange among Agent Items, Agent Recommender, and the user. A preliminary study involving several cases of Rec4Agentverse validates its significant potential for application. Lastly, we discuss potential issues and promising directions for future research.

Tianhao Shi, Yang Zhang, Jizhi Zhang et al.

As recommender systems are indispensable in various domains such as job searching and e-commerce, providing equitable recommendations to users with different sensitive attributes becomes an imperative requirement. Prior approaches for enhancing fairness in recommender systems presume the availability of all sensitive attributes, which can be difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns or inadequate means of capturing these attributes. In practice, the efficacy of these approaches is limited, pushing us to investigate ways of promoting fairness with limited sensitive attribute information. Toward this goal, it is important to reconstruct missing sensitive attributes. Nevertheless, reconstruction errors are inevitable due to the complexity of real-world sensitive attribute reconstruction problems and legal regulations. Thus, we pursue fair learning methods that are robust to reconstruction errors. To this end, we propose Distributionally Robust Fair Optimization (DRFO), which minimizes the worst-case unfairness over all potential probability distributions of missing sensitive attributes instead of the reconstructed one to account for the impact of the reconstruction errors. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence to demonstrate that our method can effectively ensure fairness in recommender systems when only limited sensitive attributes are accessible.

Moxin Li, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng et al.

Large Language Model (LLM) has demonstrated significant ability in various Natural Language Processing tasks. However, their effectiveness is highly dependent on the phrasing of the task prompt, leading to research on automatic prompt optimization using labeled task data. We reveal that these prompt optimization techniques are vulnerable to distribution shifts such as subpopulation shifts, which are common for LLMs in real-world scenarios such as customer reviews analysis. In this light, we propose a new problem of robust prompt optimization for LLMs against distribution shifts, which requires the prompt optimized over the labeled source group can simultaneously generalize to an unlabeled target group. To solve this problem, we propose Generalized Prompt Optimization framework, which incorporates the unlabeled data from the target group into prompt optimization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework with significant performance improvement on the target group and comparable performance on the source group.

Fuli Feng, Jizhi Zhang, Xiangnan He et al.

Present language understanding methods have demonstrated extraordinary ability of recognizing patterns in texts via machine learning. However, existing methods indiscriminately use the recognized patterns in the testing phase that is inherently different from us humans who have counterfactual thinking, e.g., to scrutinize for the hard testing samples. Inspired by this, we propose a Counterfactual Reasoning Model, which mimics the counterfactual thinking by learning from few counterfactual samples. In particular, we devise a generation module to generate representative counterfactual samples for each factual sample, and a retrospective module to retrospect the model prediction by comparing the counterfactual and factual samples. Extensive experiments on sentiment analysis (SA) and natural language inference (NLI) validate the effectiveness of our method.