In the era of large models, content generation is gradually shifting to Personalized Generation (PGen), tailoring content to individual preferences and needs. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey on PGen, investigating existing research in this rapidly growing field. We conceptualize PGen from a unified perspective, systematically formalizing its key components, core objectives, and abstract workflows. Based on this unified perspective, we propose a multi-level taxonomy, offering an in-depth review of technical advancements, commonly used datasets, and evaluation metrics across multiple modalities, personalized contexts, and tasks. Moreover, we envision the potential applications of PGen and highlight open challenges and promising directions for future exploration. By bridging PGen research across multiple modalities, this survey serves as a valuable resource for fostering knowledge sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration, ultimately contributing to a more personalized digital landscape.

Frequently updating Large Language Model (LLM)-based recommender systems to adapt to dynamic user interests—as done for traditional ones—is impractical due to high training costs, even with acceleration methods. This work explores the possibility of adapting the model to dynamic user interests without any model-level updates via In-context Learning (ICL), which enables adaptation through few-shot examples within input prompts. While using recent user interactions as ICL demonstrations offers a potential solution for dynamic interest adaptation, existing LLM-based recommenders face critical limitations: recommendation-specific tuning often diminishes the model’s in-context learning ability, and the original LLM’s ICL lacks task-specific optimization for recommendations. To bridge this gap, we introduce RecICL, a framework that establishes recommendation-oriented in-context learning by structuring recent user interactions and current inputs into ICL formats. RecICL achieves dual objectives: (1) preserving fundamental ICL capabilities during recommendation adaptation and (2) dynamically capturing user preference evolution through the most recent interactions. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate RecICL’s superior performance, achieving better results without model updates. Our implementation is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RecICL-8003.

When adapting Large Language Models for Recommendation (LLMRec), it is crucial to integrate collaborative information. Existing methods achieve this by learning collaborative embeddings in LLMs’ latent space from scratch or by mapping from external models. However, they fail to represent the information in a text-like format, which may not align optimally with LLMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce BinLLM, a novel LLMRec method that seamlessly integrates collaborative information through text-like encoding. BinLLM converts collaborative embeddings from external models into binary sequences — a specific text format that LLMs can understand and operate on directly, facilitating the direct usage of collaborative information in text-like format by LLMs. Additionally, BinLLM provides options to compress the binary sequence using dot-decimal notation to avoid excessively long lengths. Extensive experiments validate that BinLLM introduces collaborative information in a manner better aligned with LLMs, resulting in enhanced performance. We release our code at https://github.com/zyang1580/BinLLM.

We study the out-of-distribution generalization of active learning that adaptively selects samples for annotation in learning the decision boundary of classification. Our empirical study finds that increasingly annotating seen samples may hardly benefit the generalization. To address the problem, we propose Counterfactual Active Learning (CounterAL) that empowers active learning with counterfactual thinking to bridge the seen samples with unseen cases. In addition to annotating factual samples, CounterAL requires annotators to answer counterfactual questions to construct counterfactual samples for training. To achieve CounterAL, we design a new acquisition strategy that selects the informative factual-counterfactual pairs for annotation; and a new training strategy that pushes the model update to focus on the discrepancy between factual and counterfactual samples. We evaluate CounterAL on multiple public datasets of sentiment analysis and natural language inference. The experiment results show that CounterAL requires fewer acquisition rounds and outperforms existing active learning methods by a large margin in OOD tests with comparable IID performance.

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to red teaming attacks, which can induce LLMs to generate harmful content. Previous research constructs attack prompts via manual or automatic methods, which have their own limitations on construction cost and quality. To address these issues, we propose an integrated approach that combines manual and automatic methods to economically generate high-quality attack prompts. Specifically, considering the impressive capabilities of newly emerged LLMs, we propose an attack framework to instruct LLMs to mimic human-generated prompts through in-context learning. Furthermore, we propose a defense framework that fine-tunes victim LLMs through iterative interactions with the attack framework to enhance their safety against red teaming attacks. Extensive experiments on different LLMs validate the effectiveness of our proposed attack and defense frameworks. Additionally, we release a series of attack prompts datasets named SAP with varying sizes, facilitating the safety evaluation and enhancement of more LLMs.

Neural discrete reasoning (NDR) has shown remarkable progress in combining deep models with discrete reasoning. However, we find that existing NDR solution suffers from large performance drop on hypothetical questions, e.g. “what the annualized rate of return would be if the revenue in 2020 was doubled”. The key to hypothetical question answering (HQA) is counterfactual thinking, which is a natural ability of human reasoning but difficult for deep models. In this work, we devise a Learning to Imagine (L2I) module, which can be seamlessly incorporated into NDR models to perform the imagination of unseen counterfactual. In particular, we formulate counterfactual thinking into two steps: 1) identifying the fact to intervene, and 2) deriving the counterfactual from the fact and assumption, which are designed as neural networks. Based on TAT-QA, we construct a very challenging HQA dataset with 8,283 hypothetical questions. We apply the proposed L2I to TAGOP, the state-of-the-art solution on TAT-QA, validating the rationality and effectiveness of our approach.

Click behaviors are widely used for learning news recommendation models, but they are heavily affected by the biases brought by the news display positions. It is important to remove position biases to train unbiased recommendation model and capture unbiased user interest. In this paper, we propose a news recommendation method named DebiasGAN that can effectively alleviate position biases via adversarial learning. The core idea is modeling the personalized effect of position bias on click behaviors in a candidate-aware way, and learning debiased candidate-aware user embeddings from which the position information cannot be discriminated. More specifically, we use a bias-aware click model to capture the effect of position bias on click behaviors, and use a bias-invariant click model with random candidate positions to estimate the ideally unbiased click scores. We apply adversarial learning to the embeddings learned by the two models to help the bias-invariant click model capture debiased user interest. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show that DebiasGAN effectively improves news recommendation by eliminating position biases.

In this paper, we present our submission to the sentence-level MQM benchmark at Quality Estimation Shared Task, named UniTE (Unified Translation Evaluation). Specifically, our systems employ the framework of UniTE, which combined three types of input formats during training with a pre-trained language model. First, we apply the pseudo-labeled data examples for the continuously pre-training phase. Notably, to reduce the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, we use data cropping and a ranking-based score normalization strategy. For the fine-tuning phase, we use both Direct Assessment (DA) and Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) data from past years’ WMT competitions. Finally, we collect the source-only evaluation results, and ensemble the predictions generated by two UniTE models, whose backbones are XLM-R and infoXLM, respectively. Results show that our models reach 1st overall ranking in the Multilingual and English-Russian settings, and 2nd overall ranking in English-German and Chinese-English settings, showing relatively strong performances in this year’s quality estimation competition.

Entity Resolution (ER) identifies records that refer to the same real-world entity. Deep learning approaches improved the generalization ability of entity matching models, but hardly overcame the impact of noisy or incomplete data sources. In real scenes, an entity usually consists of multiple semantic facets, called aspects. In this paper, we focus on entity augmentation, namely retrieving the values of missing aspects. The relationship between aspects is naturally suitable to be represented by a knowledge graph, where entity augmentation can be modeled as a link prediction problem. Our paper proposes a novel graph-based approach to solve entity augmentation. Specifically, we apply a dedicated random walk algorithm, which uses node types to limit the traversal length, and encodes graph structure into low-dimensional embeddings. Thus, the missing aspects could be retrieved by a link prediction model. Furthermore, the augmented aspects with fixed orders are served as the input of a deep Siamese BiLSTM network for entity matching. We compared our method with state-of-the-art methods through extensive experiments on downstream ER tasks. According to the experiment results, our model outperforms other methods on evaluation metrics (accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score) to a large extent, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.

Existing solutions to task-oriented dialogue systems follow pipeline designs which introduces architectural complexity and fragility. We propose a novel, holistic, extendable framework based on a single sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model which can be optimized with supervised or reinforcement learning. A key contribution is that we design text spans named belief spans to track dialogue believes, allowing task-oriented dialogue systems to be modeled in a seq2seq way. Based on this, we propose a simplistic Two Stage CopyNet instantiation which emonstrates good scalability: significantly reducing model complexity in terms of number of parameters and training time by a magnitude. It significantly outperforms state-of-the-art pipeline-based methods on large datasets and retains a satisfactory entity match rate on out-of-vocabulary (OOV) cases where pipeline-designed competitors totally fail.

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with negative sampling is the most prevalent approach to learn word representations. However, it is known that sampling methods are biased especially when the sampling distribution deviates from the true data distribution. Besides, SGD suffers from dramatic fluctuation due to the one-sample learning scheme. In this work, we propose AllVec that uses batch gradient learning to generate word representations from all training samples. Remarkably, the time complexity of AllVec remains at the same level as SGD, being determined by the number of positive samples rather than all samples. We evaluate AllVec on several benchmark tasks. Experiments show that AllVec outperforms sampling-based SGD methods with comparable efficiency, especially for small training corpora.