Leveraging the vast open-world knowledge and understanding capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to develop general-purpose, semantically-aware recommender systems has emerged as a pivotal research direction in generative recommendation. However, existing methods face bottlenecks in constructing item identifiers. Text-based methods introduce LLMs’ vast output space, leading to hallucination, while methods based on Semantic IDs (SIDs) encounter a semantic gap between SIDs and LLMs’ native vocabulary, requiring costly vocabulary expansion and alignment training. To address this, this paper introduces Term IDs (TIDs), defined as a set of semantically rich and standardized textual keywords, to serve as robust item identifiers. We propose GRAM, a novel framework centered on TIDs, employs Context-aware Term Generation to convert item’s metadata into standardized TIDs and utilizes Integrative Instruction Fine-tuning to collaboratively optimize term internalization and sequential recommendation. Additionally, Elastic Identifier Grounding is designed for robust item mapping. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that GRAM significantly outperforms baselines across multiple scenarios, pointing a promising direction for generalizable and high-performance generative recommendation systems.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) enables users to search for target images using both a reference image and manipulation text, offering substantial advantages over single-modality retrieval systems. However, existing CIR methods suffer from representation space fragmentation: queries and targets comprise heterogeneous modalities and are processed by distinct encoders, forcing models to bridge misaligned representation spaces only through post-hoc alignment, which fundamentally limits retrieval performance. As evidenced by t-SNE visualization in Fig.(a), this architectural asymmetry manifests as three distinct, well-separated clusters in the feature space, directly demonstrating how heterogeneous modalities create fundamentally misaligned representation spaces from initialization. In this work, we propose CSMCIR, a unified representation framework that achieves efficient query-target alignment through three synergistic components. First, we introduce a Multi-level Chain-of-Thought (MCoT) prompting strategy that guides Multimodal Large Language Models to generate discriminative, semantically compatible captions for target images, establishing modal symmetry. Building upon this, we design a symmetric dual-tower architecture where both query and target sides utilize the identical shared-parameter Q-Former for cross-modal encoding, ensuring consistent feature representations and further reducing the alignment gap. Finally, this architectural symmetry enables an entropy-based, temporally dynamic Memory Bank strategy that provides high-quality negative samples while maintaining consistency with the evolving model state. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our CSMCIR achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior training efficiency. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each proposed component.

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based enhancement of large language models (LLMs) often leads to reduced output diversity, undermining their utility in open-ended tasks like creative writing. Current methods lack explicit mechanisms for guiding diverse exploration and instead prioritize optimization efficiency and performance over diversity. This paper proposes an RL framework structured around a semi-structured long Chain-of-Thought (CoT), in which the generation process is decomposed into explicitly planned intermediate steps. We introduce a Diverse Planning Branching method that strategically introduces divergence at the planning phase based on diversity variation, alongside a group-aware diversity reward to encourage distinct trajectories. Experimental results on creative writing benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves output diversity without compromising generation quality, consistently outperforming existing baselines.

Large Language Models demonstrate strong capabilities in single-turn instruction following but suffer from Lost-in-Conversation (LiC), a degradation in performance as information is revealed progressively in multi-turn settings. Motivated by the current progress on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), we propose Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Accuracy and Abstention Rewards (RLAAR), a framework that encourages models not only to generate correct answers, but also to judge the solvability of questions in the multi-turn conversation setting. Our approach employs a competence-gated curriculum that incrementally increases dialogue difficulty (in terms of instruction shards), stabilizing training while promoting reliability. Using multi-turn, on-policy rollouts and a mixed-reward system, RLAAR teaches models to balance problem-solving with informed abstention, reducing premature answering behaviors that cause LiC. Evaluated on LiC benchmarks, RLAAR significantly mitigates LiC performance decay (62.6% to 75.1%) and improves calibrated abstention rates (33.5% to 73.4%). Together, these results provide a practical recipe for building multi-turn reliable and trustworthy LLMs.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) towards autonomous agents has catalyzed progress in Deep Research. While retrieval capabilities are well-benchmarked, the post-retrieval synthesis stage—where agents must digest massive amounts of context and consolidate fragmented evidence into coherent, long-form reports—remains under-evaluated due to the subjectivity of open-ended writing.To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepSynth-Eval, a benchmark designed to objectively evaluate information consolidation capabilities. We leverage high-quality survey papers as gold standards, reverse-engineer research requests, and construct Oracle Contexts from their bibliographies to isolate synthesis from retrieval noise. We propose a fine-grained evaluation protocol using General Checklists (for factual coverage) and Constraint Checklists (for structural organization), transforming subjective judgment into verifiable metrics. Experiments across 96 tasks reveal that synthesizing information from hundreds of references remains a significant challenge. Our results demonstrate that agentic "plan-then-write" workflows significantly outperform single-turn generation, effectively reducing hallucinations and improving adherence to complex structural constraints.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising approach to address key limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as hallucination, outdated knowledge, and lacking reliable reference. However, current RAG frameworks often struggle with identifying whether retrieved documents meaningfully contribute to answer generation. This shortcoming makes it difficult to filter out irrelevant or even misleading content, which notably impacts the final performance. In this paper, we propose Document Information Gain (DIG), a novel metric designed to quantify the contribution of retrieved documents to correct answer generation. DIG measures a document’s value by computing the difference of LLM’s generation confidence with and without the document augmented. Further, we introduce InfoGain-RAG, a framework that leverages DIG scores to train a specialized reranker, which prioritizes each retrieved document from exact distinguishing and accurate sorting perspectives. This approach can effectively filter out irrelevant documents and select the most valuable ones for better answer generation. Extensive experiments across various models and benchmarks demonstrate that InfoGain-RAG can significantly outperform existing approaches, on both single and multiple retrieval paradigm. Specifically on NaturalQA, it achieves the improvements of 17.9%, 4.5%, 12.5% in exact match accuracy against naive RAG, self-reflective RAG and modern ranking-based RAG respectively, and even an average of 15.3% increment on advanced proprietary models GPT-4o across all datasets. These results demonstrate the feasibility of InfoGain-RAG as it can offer a reliable solution for RAG in multiple applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by Claude and LLama, have exhibited impressive proficiency in tackling a myriad of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Yet, in pursuit of the ambitious goal of attaining Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), there remains ample room for enhancing LLM capabilities. Chief among these is the pressing need to bolster long-context comprehension. Numerous real-world scenarios demand LLMs to adeptly reason across extended contexts, such as multi-turn dialogues or agent workflow. Hence, recent advancements have been dedicated to stretching the upper bounds of long-context comprehension, with models like Claude 3 accommodating up to 200k tokens, employing various techniques to achieve this feat. Aligned with this progression, we propose a leaderboard LongLeader that seeks to comprehensively assess different long-context comprehension abilities of diverse LLMs and context length extension strategies across meticulously selected benchmarks. Specifically, we aim to address the following questions: 1) Do LLMs genuinely deliver the long-context proficiency they purport? 2) Which benchmarks offer reliable metrics for evaluating long-context comprehension? 3) What technical strategies prove effective in extending the understanding of longer contexts? We streamline the evaluation process for LLMs on the benchmarks, offering open-source access to the benchmarks and maintaining a dedicated website for leaderboards. We will continuously curate new datasets and update models to the leaderboards.

Entity alignment (EA) is crucial for integrating multi-source knowledge graphs (KGs), aiming to identify equivalent entities across different graphs. However, most existing EA decoding methods rely on both entity and relation embeddings, limiting their generalizability and efficiency, especially in GNN-based models. To address these challenges, we propose Triple Feature Propagation (TFP), an adaptable and fast EA decoding framework that only utilizes entity embeddings. TFP reconstructs KG representation by maximizing the smoothness of entity embeddings. The discretized smoothness-maximization process yields the explicit Euler solution of TFP. We also generalize multi-view matrices: entity-to-entity, entity-to-relation, relation-to-entity, and relation-to-triple, to capture structural diversity. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that TFP is fast and adaptable to various encoders, achieving comparable results to state-of-the-art methods in under 6 seconds, and surpassing them in many cases.

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is a nascent multimodal task that aims to identify named entities, entity types and their corresponding visual regions. GMNER task exhibits two challenging properties: 1) The weak correlation between image-text pairs in social media results in a significant portion of named entities being ungroundable. 2) There exists a distinction between coarse-grained referring expressions commonly used in similar tasks (e.g., phrase localization, referring expression comprehension) and fine-grained named entities. In this paper, we propose RiVEG, a unified framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as a connecting bridge. This reformulation brings two benefits: 1) It maintains the optimal MNER performance and eliminates the need for employing object detection methods to pre-extract regional features, thereby naturally addressing two major limitations of existing GMNER methods. 2) The introduction of entity expansion expression and Visual Entailment (VE) module unifies Visual Grounding (VG) and Entity Grounding (EG). It enables RiVEG to effortlessly inherit the Visual Entailment and Visual Grounding capabilities of any current or prospective multimodal pretraining models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiVEG outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the existing GMNER dataset and achieves absolute leads of 10.65%, 6.21%, and 8.83% in all three subtasks.

Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) on social media aims to enhance textual entity prediction by incorporating image-based clues. Existing studies mainly focus on maximizing the utilization of pertinent image information or incorporating external knowledge from explicit knowledge bases. However, these methods either neglect the necessity of providing the model with external knowledge, or encounter issues of high redundancy in the retrieved knowledge. In this paper, we present PGIM — a two-stage framework that aims to leverage ChatGPT as an implicit knowledge base and enable it to heuristically generate auxiliary knowledge for more efficient entity prediction. Specifically, PGIM contains a Multimodal Similar Example Awareness module that selects suitable examples from a small number of predefined artificial samples. These examples are then integrated into a formatted prompt template tailored to the MNER and guide ChatGPT to generate auxiliary refined knowledge. Finally, the acquired knowledge is integrated with the original text and fed into a downstream model for further processing. Extensive experiments show that PGIM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two classic MNER datasets and exhibits a stronger robustness and generalization capability.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is an established component within a conversational AI or digital assistant system, and it is responsible for producing semantic understanding of a user request. We propose a scalable and automatic approach for improving NLU in a large-scale conversational AI system by leveraging implicit user feedback, with an insight that user interaction data and dialog context have rich information embedded from which user satisfaction and intention can be inferred. In particular, we propose a domain-agnostic framework for curating new supervision data for improving NLU from live production traffic. With an extensive set of experiments, we show the results of applying the framework and improving NLU for a large-scale production system across 10 domains.

One great challenge in neural sequence labeling is the data sparsity problem for rare entity words and phrases. Most of test set entities appear only few times and are even unseen in training corpus, yielding large number of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) and low-frequency (LF) entities during evaluation. In this work, we propose approaches to address this problem. For OOV entities, we introduce local context reconstruction to implicitly incorporate contextual information into their representations. For LF entities, we present delexicalized entity identification to explicitly extract their frequency-agnostic and entity-type-specific representations. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that our model has significantly outperformed all previous methods and achieved new start-of-the-art results. Notably, our methods surpass the model fine-tuned on pre-trained language models without external resource.

Consumers dissatisfied with the normal dispute resolution process provided by an e-commerce company’s customer service agents have the option of escalating their complaints by filing grievances with a government authority. This paper tackles the challenge of monitoring ongoing text chat dialogues to identify cases where the customer expresses such an intent, providing triage and prioritization for a separate pool of specialized agents specially trained to handle more complex situations. We describe a hybrid model that tackles this challenge by integrating recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features. Experiments show that both components are complementary and contribute to overall recall, outperforming competitive baselines. A trial online deployment of our model demonstrates its business value in improving customer service.

Domain classification is the task to map spoken language utterances to one of the natural language understanding domains in intelligent personal digital assistants (IPDAs). This is observed in mainstream IPDAs in industry and third-party domains are developed to enhance the capability of the IPDAs. As more and more new domains are developed very frequently, how to continuously accommodate the new domains still remains challenging. Moreover, if one wants to use personalized information dynamically for better domain classification, it is infeasible to directly adopt existing continual learning approaches. In this paper, we propose CoNDA, a neural-based approach for continuous domain adaption with normalization and regularization. Unlike existing methods that often conduct full model parameter update, CoNDA only updates the necessary parameters in the model for the new domains. Empirical evaluation shows that CoNDA achieves high accuracy on both the accommodated new domains and the existing known domains for which input samples come with personal information, and outperforms the baselines by a large margin.