Diffusion-based recommenders learn user preferences by denoising interaction histories, but the added noise can distort the original preference signals. Flow-based collaborative filtering (CF) instead learns a discrete path from a sampled source to the user's observed training interactions (the target history), enabling inference in a few steps. Existing flow-based CF methods sample sources using global item frequencies to reflect the sparsity and popularity of observed interactions. Each source is sampled independently of its target history, leaving the predictor without user-specific source cues for learning to reconstruct that history. We propose SourceFlow, which brings collaborative structure into the source distribution itself rather than adding further conditioning to the predictor. Like inference from observed histories, training uses collaborative evidence to predict missing interactions. Specifically, Neighborhood Coupling constructs displaced binary sources by replacing historical items with unobserved collaborative alternatives. Collaborative Consensus further refines replacement probabilities using evidence from other interactions of users who share the observed item. Stretched Restoration retains these replacements at late flow times during training, providing more opportunities to recover the original interactions. Experiments on five recommendation datasets show consistent improvements over competitive baselines, including a mean relative Recall@10 gain of 15.7% over the strongest flow-based baseline. Controlled experiments confirm that these gains depend on correctly pairing collaborative sources with their target histories, as reassigning the same source vectors across users reverses the gains. Code will be publicly released upon acceptance.
Jinchang Zhu, Jindong Li, Cheng Zhang Jilin University, Jiahong Liu The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Menglin Yang HKUST(GZ)
Long-term memory is a critical challenge for Large Language Model agents, as fixed context windows cannot preserve coherence across extended interactions. Existing memory systems represent conversation history as unstructured embedding vectors, retrieving information through semantic similarity. This paradigm fails to capture the associative structure of human memory, wherein related experiences progressively strengthen interconnections through repeated co-activation. Inspired by cognitive neuroscience, we identify three mechanisms central to biological memory: association, consolidation, and spreading activation, which remain largely absent in current research. To bridge this gap, we propose HeLa-Mem, a bio-inspired memory architecture that models memory as a dynamic graph with Hebbian learning dynamics. HeLa-Mem employs a dual-level organization: (1) an episodic memory graph that evolves through co-activation patterns, and (2) a semantic memory store populated via Hebbian Distillation, wherein a Reflective Agent identifies densely connected memory hubs and distills them into structured, reusable semantic knowledge. This dual-path design leverages both semantic similarity and learned associations, mirroring the episodic-semantic distinction in human cognition. Experiments on LoCoMo demonstrate superior performance across four question categories while using significantly fewer context tokens. Code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/ReinerBRO/HeLa-Mem
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表