Xinlei Shi

Shiteng Cao, Xiaochong Lan, Yuwei Du et al.

Local life service recommendation is distinct from general recommendation scenarios due to its strong living need-driven nature. Fundamentally, accurately identifying a user's immediate living need and recommending the corresponding service are inextricably linked tasks. However, prior works typically treat them in isolation, failing to achieve a unified modeling of need prediction and service recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel large language model based framework that jointly performs living need prediction and service recommendation. To address the challenge of noise in raw consumption data, we introduce a behavioral clustering approach that filters out accidental factors and selectively preserves typical patterns. This enables the model to learn a robust logical basis for need generation and spontaneously generalize to long-tail scenarios. To navigate the vast search space stemming from diverse needs, merchants, and complex mapping paths, we employ a curriculum learning strategy combined with reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. This approach guides the model to sequentially learn the logic from need generation to category mapping and specific service selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our unified framework significantly enhances both living need prediction performance and recommendation accuracy, validating the effectiveness of jointly modeling living needs and user behaviors.

Xiaochong Lan, Jie Feng, Jiahuan Lei et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities and achieved significant breakthroughs across various domains, leading to their widespread adoption in recent years. Building on this progress, we investigate their potential in the realm of local life services. In this study, we establish a comprehensive benchmark and systematically evaluate the performance of diverse LLMs across a wide range of tasks relevant to local life services. To further enhance their effectiveness, we explore two key approaches: model fine-tuning and agent-based workflows. Our findings reveal that even a relatively compact 7B model can attain performance levels comparable to a much larger 72B model, effectively balancing inference cost and model capability. This optimization greatly enhances the feasibility and efficiency of deploying LLMs in real-world online services, making them more practical and accessible for local life applications.

Xiaochong Lan, Jie Feng, Yizhou Sun et al.

Living needs are the needs people generate in their daily lives for survival and well-being. On life service platforms like Meituan, user purchases are driven by living needs, making accurate living need predictions crucial for personalized service recommendations. Traditional approaches treat this prediction as a closed-set classification problem, severely limiting their ability to capture the diversity and complexity of living needs. In this work, we redefine living need prediction as an open-set classification problem and propose PIGEON, a novel system leveraging large language models (LLMs) for unrestricted need prediction. PIGEON first employs a behavior-aware record retriever to help LLMs understand user preferences, then incorporates Maslow's hierarchy of needs to align predictions with human living needs. For evaluation and application, we design a recall module based on a fine-tuned text embedding model that links flexible need descriptions to appropriate life services. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that PIGEON significantly outperforms closed-set approaches on need-based life service recall by an average of 19.37%. Human evaluation validates the reasonableness and specificity of our predictions. Additionally, we employ instruction tuning to enable smaller LLMs to achieve competitive performance, supporting practical deployment.

Xiaochong Lan, Jie Feng, Yinxing Liu et al.

Ranking online reviews by their intrinsic quality is a critical task for e-commerce platforms and information services, impacting user experience and business outcomes. However, quality is a domain-dependent and dynamic concept, making its assessment a formidable challenge. Traditional methods relying on hand-crafted features are unscalable across domains and fail to adapt to evolving content patterns, while modern deep learning approaches often produce black-box models that lack interpretability and may prioritize semantics over quality. To address these challenges, we propose AutoQual, an LLM-based agent framework that automates the discovery of interpretable features. While demonstrated on review quality assessment, AutoQual is designed as a general framework for transforming tacit knowledge embedded in data into explicit, computable features. It mimics a human research process, iteratively generating feature hypotheses through reflection, operationalizing them via autonomous tool implementation, and accumulating experience in a persistent memory. We deploy our method on a large-scale online platform with a billion-level user base. Large-scale A/B testing confirms its effectiveness, increasing average reviews viewed per user by 0.79% and the conversion rate of review readers by 0.27%.