Serena Li

Yuhang Zhou, Zhuokai Zhao, Ke Li et al.

Feature selection is a crucial step in large-scale industrial machine learning systems, directly affecting model accuracy, efficiency, and maintainability. Traditional feature selection methods rely on labeled data and statistical heuristics, making them difficult to apply in production environments where labeled data are limited and multiple operational constraints must be satisfied. To address this, we propose Model Feature Agent (MoFA), a model-driven framework that performs sequential, reasoning-based feature selection using both semantic and quantitative feature information. MoFA incorporates feature definitions, importance scores, correlations, and metadata (e.g., feature groups or types) into structured prompts and selects features through interpretable, constraint-aware reasoning. We evaluate MoFA in three real-world industrial applications: (1) True Interest and Time-Worthiness Prediction, where it improves accuracy while reducing feature group complexity, (2) Value Model Enhancement, where it discovers high-order interaction terms that yield substantial engagement gains in online experiments, and (3) Notification Behavior Prediction, where it selects compact, high-value feature subsets that improve both model accuracy and inference efficiency. Together, these results demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of LLM-based reasoning for feature selection in real production systems.

Kevin Han, Yuhang Zhou, Mingze Gao et al.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, dominant approaches like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) face critical stability challenges: they suffer from high estimator variance under computational constraints (small group sizes) and vanishing gradient signals in saturated failure regimes where all responses yield identical zero rewards. To address this, we propose Empirical Bayes Policy Optimization (EBPO), a novel framework that regularizes local group-based baselines by borrowing strength from the policy's accumulated global statistics. Instead of estimating baselines in isolation, EBPO employs a shrinkage estimator that dynamically balances local group statistics with a global prior updated via Welford's online algorithm. Theoretically, we demonstrate that EBPO guarantees strictly lower Mean Squared Error (MSE), bounded entropy decay, and non-vanishing penalty signals in failure scenarios compared to GRPO. Empirically, EBPO consistently outperforms GRPO and other established baselines across diverse benchmarks, including AIME and OlympiadBench. Notably, EBPO exhibits superior training stability, achieving high-performance gains even with small group sizes, and benefits significantly from difficulty-stratified curriculum learning.

Xufeng Cai, Ziwei Guan, Lei Yuan et al.

Modern recommendation systems can be broadly divided into two key stages: the ranking stage, where the system predicts various user engagements (e.g., click-through rate, like rate, follow rate, watch time), and the value model stage, which aggregates these predictive scores through a function (e.g., a linear combination defined by a weight vector) to measure the value of each content by a single numerical score. Both stages play roughly equally important roles in real industrial systems; however, how to optimize the model weights for the second stage still lacks systematic study. This paper focuses on optimizing the second stage through auto-tuning technology. Although general auto-tuning systems and solutions - both from established production practices and open-source solutions - can address this problem, they typically require weeks or even months to identify a feasible solution. Such prolonged tuning processes are unacceptable in production environments for recommendation systems, as suboptimal value models can severely degrade user experience. An effective auto-tuning solution is required to identify a viable model within 2-3 days, rather than the extended timelines typically associated with existing approaches. In this paper, we introduce a practical auto-tuning system named HyperZero that addresses these time constraints while effectively solving the unique challenges inherent in modern recommendation systems. Moreover, this framework has the potential to be expanded to broader tuning tasks within recommendation systems.

Yan Wang, Lequn Wang, Yurong You et al.

Not all people are equally easy to identify: color statistics might be enough for some cases while others might require careful reasoning about high- and low-level details. However, prevailing person re-identification(re-ID) methods use one-size-fits-all high-level embeddings from deep convolutional networks for all cases. This might limit their accuracy on difficult examples or makes them needlessly expensive for the easy ones. To remedy this, we present a new person re-ID model that combines effective embeddings built on multiple convolutional network layers, trained with deep-supervision. On traditional re-ID benchmarks, our method improves substantially over the previous state-of-the-art results on all five datasets that we evaluate on. We then propose two new formulations of the person re-ID problem under resource-constraints, and show how our model can be used to effectively trade off accuracy and computation in the presence of resource constraints. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/mileyan/DARENet.

Caojin Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Ke Li et al.

Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in generation and reasoning tasks, where they generate text responses given instructions. However, many applications, e.g., retrieval augmented generation (RAG), still rely on separate embedding models to generate text embeddings, which can complicate the system and introduce discrepancies in understanding of the query between the embedding model and LLMs. To address this limitation, we propose a simple self-supervised approach, Generative Embedding large language Model (GEM), that enables any large decoder-only LLM to generate high-quality text embeddings while maintaining its original text generation and reasoning capabilities. Our method inserts new special token(s) into a text body, and generates summarization embedding of the text by manipulating the attention mask. This method could be easily integrated into post-training or fine tuning stages of any existing LLMs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by applying it to two popular LLM families, ranging from 1B to 8B parameters, and evaluating the transformed models on both text embedding benchmarks (MTEB) and NLP benchmarks (MMLU). The results show that our proposed method significantly improves the original LLMs on MTEB while having a minimal impact on MMLU. Our strong results indicate that our approach can empower LLMs with state-of-the-art text embedding capabilities while maintaining their original NLP performance

Yuhang Zhou, Mingrui Zhang, Ke Li et al.

Understanding and reasoning over tables is a critical capability for many real-world applications. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on this task, but current approaches remain limited. Fine-tuning based methods strengthen language reasoning; yet they are prone to arithmetic errors and hallucination. In contrast, tool-based methods enable precise table manipulation but rely on rigid schemas and lack semantic understanding. These complementary drawbacks highlight the need for approaches that integrate robust reasoning with reliable table processing. In this work, we propose Mixture-of-Minds, a multi-agent framework that decomposes table reasoning into three specialized roles: planning, coding, and answering. This design enables each agent to focus on a specific aspect of the task while leveraging code execution for precise table manipulation. Building on this workflow, we introduce a self-improvement training framework that employs Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) rollouts to generate pseudo-gold trajectories and optimize agents with reinforcement learning (RL). Extensive experiments show that Mixture-of-Minds delivers substantial gains, reaching 62.13% on TableBench and surpassing OpenAI-o4-mini-high. These results demonstrate the promise of combining structured multi-agent workflows with RL to advance table understanding.