Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the response capabilities of language models by integrating external knowledge sources. However, document chunking as an important part of RAG system often lacks effective evaluation tools. This paper first analyzes why existing RAG evaluation benchmarks are inadequate for assessing document chunking quality, specifically due to evidence sparsity. Based on this conclusion, we propose HiCBench, which includes manually annotated multi-level document chunking points, synthesized evidence-dense question answer(QA) pairs, and their corresponding evidence sources. We also propose HiChunk, a hierarchical document structuring framework using fine-tuned LLMs and the Auto-Merge retrieval algorithm to enhance retrieval quality. Experiments demonstrate that HiCBench effectively evaluates the impact of different chunking methods across the entire RAG pipeline. Moreover, HiChunk achieves better chunking quality within reasonable time consumption, thereby enhancing the overall performance of RAG systems. Source code is available at https://github.com/TencentCloudADP/hichunk.

Inspired by the exceptional general intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers have begun to explore their application in pioneering the next generation of recommender systems — systems that are conversational, explainable, and controllable. However, existing literature primarily concentrates on integrating domain-specific knowledge into LLMs to enhance accuracy using a fixed task template, often overlooking the diversity of recommendation tasks and the ability of LLMs to follow recommendation-specific instructions. To address this gap, we first introduce a collection of supervised learning tasks, augmented with labels derived from a conventional recommender model, aimed at explicitly improving LLMs’ proficiency in adhering to recommendation-specific instructions. Next, we propose a reinforcement learning-based alignment procedure to enhance LLMs’ generalization ability. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the capability of LLMs to respond to instructions within recommender systems, reducing formatting errors while maintaining a high level of accuracy.

Explainable recommendation is a technique that combines prediction and generation tasks to produce more persuasive results. Among these tasks, textual generation demands large amounts of data to achieve satisfactory accuracy. However, historical user reviews of items are often insufficient, making it challenging to ensure the precision of generated explanation text. To address this issue, we propose a novel model, ERRA (Explainable Recommendation by personalized Review retrieval and Aspect learning). With retrieval enhancement, ERRA can obtain additional information from the training sets. With this additional information, we can generate more accurate and informative explanations. Furthermore, to better capture users’ preferences, we incorporate an aspect enhancement component into our model. By selecting the top-n aspects that users are most concerned about for different items, we can model user representation with more relevant details, making the explanation more persuasive. To verify the effectiveness of our model, extensive experiments on three datasets show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (for example, 3.4% improvement in prediction and 15.8% improvement in explanation for TripAdvisor).