4.2IRFeb 24
HiSAC: Hierarchical Sparse Activation Compression for Ultra-long Sequence Modeling in RecommendersKun Yuan, Junyu Bi, Daixuan Cheng et al.
Modern recommender systems leverage ultra-long user behavior sequences to capture dynamic preferences, but end-to-end modeling is infeasible in production due to latency and memory constraints. While summarizing history via interest centers offers a practical alternative, existing methods struggle to (1) identify user-specific centers at appropriate granularity and (2) accurately assign behaviors, leading to quantization errors and loss of long-tail preferences. To alleviate these issues, we propose Hierarchical Sparse Activation Compression (HiSAC), an efficient framework for personalized sequence modeling. HiSAC encodes interactions into multi-level semantic IDs and constructs a global hierarchical codebook. A hierarchical voting mechanism sparsely activates personalized interest-agents as fine-grained preference centers. Guided by these agents, Soft-Routing Attention aggregates historical signals in semantic space, weighting by similarity to minimize quantization error and retain long-tail behaviors. Deployed on Taobao's "Guess What You Like" homepage, HiSAC achieves significant compression and cost reduction, with online A/B tests showing a consistent 1.65% CTR uplift -- demonstrating its scalability and real-world effectiveness.
2.3IRFeb 24
Generative Pseudo-Labeling for Pre-Ranking with LLMsJunyu Bi, Xinting Niu, Daixuan Cheng et al.
Pre-ranking is a critical stage in industrial recommendation systems, tasked with efficiently scoring thousands of recalled items for downstream ranking. A key challenge is the train-serving discrepancy: pre-ranking models are trained only on exposed interactions, yet must score all recalled candidates -- including unexposed items -- during online serving. This mismatch not only induces severe sample selection bias but also degrades generalization, especially for long-tail content. Existing debiasing approaches typically rely on heuristics (e.g., negative sampling) or distillation from biased rankers, which either mislabel plausible unexposed items as negatives or propagate exposure bias into pseudo-labels. In this work, we propose Generative Pseudo-Labeling (GPL), a framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate unbiased, content-aware pseudo-labels for unexposed items, explicitly aligning the training distribution with the online serving space. By offline generating user-specific interest anchors and matching them with candidates in a frozen semantic space, GPL provides high-quality supervision without adding online latency. Deployed in a large-scale production system, GPL improves click-through rate by 3.07%, while significantly enhancing recommendation diversity and long-tail item discovery.
0.6CLFeb 24
Linear Reasoning vs. Proof by Cases: Obstacles for Large Language Models in FOL Problem SolvingYuliang Ji, Fuchen Shen, Jian Wu et al.
To comprehensively evaluate the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers have introduced abundant mathematical reasoning datasets. However, most existing datasets primarily focus on linear reasoning, neglecting other parts such as proof by contradiction and proof by cases, which are crucial for investigating LLMs' reasoning abilities. To address this limitation, we first introduce a novel first-order logic (FOL) dataset named PC-FOL, annotated by professional mathematicians, focusing on case-based reasoning problems. All instances in this dataset are equipped with a manually written natural language proof, clearly distinguishing it from conventional linear reasoning datasets. Our experimental results over leading LLMs demonstrate a substantial performance gap between linear reasoning and case-based reasoning problems. To further investigate this phenomenon, we provide a theoretical analysis grounded in graphical model, which provides an explanation for the observed disparity between the two types of reasoning problems. We hope this work can reveal the core challenges in the field of automated natural language mathematical proof generation, paving the way for future research.