Rong Shan, Aofan Yu, Bo Chen, Kuo Cai, Qiang Luo, Ruiming Tang, Han Li, Weiwen Liu 等 10 位作者
Recommender systems (RecSys) are increasingly emphasizing scaling, leveraging larger architectures and more interaction data to improve personalization. Yet, despite the optimizer's pivotal role in training, modern RecSys pipelines almost universally default to Adam/AdamW, with limited scrutiny of whether these choices are truly optimal for recommendation. In this work, we revisit optimizer design for scalable recommendation and introduce MuonRec, the first framework that brings the recently proposed Muon optimizer to RecSys training. Muon performs orthogonalized momentum updates for 2D weight matrices via Newton-Schulz iteration, promoting diverse update directions and improving optimization efficiency. We develop an open-source training recipe for recommendation models and evaluate it across both traditional sequential recommenders and modern generative recommenders. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MuonRec reduces converged training steps by an average of 32.4\% while simultaneously improving final ranking quality. Specifically, MuonRec yields consistent relative gains in NDCG@10, averaging 12.6\% across all settings, with particularly pronounced improvements in generative recommendation models. These results consistently outperform strong Adam/AdamW baselines, positioning Muon as a promising new optimizer standard for RecSys training. Our code is available.
Wenhao Li, Qinglin Jia, Chenghou Jin, Zihong Xian, Jiezhou Ji, Yanzhi Liu, Zezheng Wang, Bo Chen 等 12 位作者
Modeling lifetime user behavior sequences is essential for capturing long-range preferences in industrial recommendation, yet sequences containing up to 100K interactions make target-aware ranking prohibitively expensive. Search-based methods that retrieve from raw sequences incur candidate-dependent costs that grow with sequence length, whereas latent compression methods reduce computation at the expense of item-level addressability. We propose ECHO (Efficient Cascade with Homogeneous Operators), a framework that balances efficiency and fine-grained retrieval by retaining a subset of original event records per user through a Distilled Selector (DS) and retrieving a smaller set of target-relevant records for each candidate through a Target-aware Fine-grained Retriever (TFR). DS is supervised by a candidate-aware full-history teacher via per-target distillation, enabling target-aware user-level selection without requiring full-history computation for every candidate. The retriever and target-attention scorer share the relevance parameters learned by the teacher, ensuring consistent relevance estimation throughout the cascade. At a sequence length of 100K, ECHO reduces online sequence-branch FLOPs by approximately 160 times compared with a representative end-to-end model. Three deployment optimizations, including common user inputs, compact record encoding, and key-side projection absorption, further reduce memory, storage, and data-movement overhead. Experiments on KuaiRand-1K and an industrial-scale short-video platform demonstrate relative GAUC improvements ranging from 0.113% to 1.520% over state-of-the-art baselines across multiple tasks. Furthermore, online A/B tests in two production scenarios, Kuaishou and Kuaishou Lite, show that ECHO improves app usage time by 0.240% and 0.373%, respectively.
Detailed image captioning is usually framed as an amount problem: a model should mention more visual facts while avoiding hallucination. However, autoregressive VLMs generate captions as ordered sequences, and later generations may be produced under weaker or noisier visual grounding. We therefore argue that long-form captioning should be studied not only by what facts are mentioned, but also by where they appear. We introduce a position-aware rubric representation that decomposes dense human references into atomic visual claims, verifies generated captions against those claims, and induces a quartile-wise composition of supported, hallucinated, and generic content. This lens reveals two qualitatively different failures in long captions: models tend to produce unsupported specificity in the middle, while the final portion often escapes into vague, non-evidential language rather than simply accumulating more hallucination. A same-reference human control does not exhibit these patterns; additional human audits examine the visual validity of the induced labels. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose PAGER (Position-Aware Grounded Evidence Reinforcement), a GRPO training objective with separate signals for supported fine-grained middle evidence, evidence-bearing tail continuation, claim coverage, and content-aware length control. The result is a closed loop: the same ordered claim representation identifies where long captions fail and supplies the position-specific reward needed to repair those failures. Experiments on detailed-caption benchmarks show that PAGER improves position-wise grounding and pairwise caption preference while preserving competitive global caption quality.
Hao Jiang, Peiru Du, Pengfei Yao, Mengting Li, Siyuan Lou, Kuo Cai, Sheng Yu, Qiang Luo 等 13 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities, motivating their use as the backbone of foundation recommendation models (FRMs). Existing methods enhance recommendations through explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning under a Think-then-Answer paradigm. However, explicit CoT incurs substantial inference overhead by generating lengthy reasoning traces and relies on manually designed templates that struggle to capture diverse, dynamic user interests. We propose OneLatent, an efficient latent reasoning framework that compresses explicit reasoning traces into several learnable latent tokens, enabling Latent-Reason-then-Answer inference without generating verbose traces. OneLatent first introduces Multi-View Adaptive CoT (MV-ACoT), which creates diverse, high-quality teacher-generated supervision by exploring user interests from multiple perspectives and automatically adapting reasoning complexity to each instance. Building on pretrained FRMs, it then uses a three-stage latent-token alignment paradigm to progressively internalize CoT traces into learnable latent tokens. Finally, a multistage curriculum-based post-training strategy activates latent-token reasoning for downstream recommendation tasks. Experiments on an industrial-scale Kuaishou dataset and the public Kuaishou LLM-Rec benchmark show that OneLatent consistently outperforms explicit CoT-based methods and traditional baselines. Compared with the Think and No-Think variants of FRMs, OneLatent improves SID@64 by 17.44% and 9.33%, respectively, while achieving over 17x higher online inference throughput. We further develop a production serving system for scalable, real-time FRM inference. An online A/B test in Kuaishou's local-services advertising scenario shows that deploying OneLatent with this system yields an estimated 9.6% revenue lift over strong online baselines, including OneRec and OneReason.
Rongguang Ye, Zhan Zhuang, Yichen Wu, Ming Tang, Kede Ma
Continually adapting large language models requires acquiring new knowledge while preserving previously learned capabilities. Although jointly adapting model parameters and task-specific soft prompts is promising, it has two key limitations: previously learned prompts may lose effectiveness as the model evolves, and relationships among prompts that could support cross-task transfer are not explicitly learned. We propose Learning an Anchored Prompt Space (LAPS), which preserves historical prompt effectiveness and learns relationships among task-specific soft prompts to facilitate positive transfer. Historical prompts are first aligned with the updated model through self-distillation. LAPS then constructs an anchored prompt space whose vertices correspond to learned task-specific soft prompts and whose intermediate geometry is shaped by learnable Bézier control prompts. Once this space is learned, LAPS identifies the best-performing prompt for each task on its validation set, allowing the selected prompt to draw on knowledge acquired from related tasks. Experiments on the TRACE benchmark across three Qwen3 model scales show that LAPS consistently outperforms existing distillation-based, prompt-based, and joint prompt-parameter adaptation methods, improving overall task performance while reducing forgetting.
Scaling model capacity has emerged as an effective approach to overcoming performance bottlenecks in industrial recommender systems. However, repeatedly training new models from scratch requires large amounts of data and substantial training resources. Parameter inheritance provides a promising route for both dense model growth and sparse conversion, yet existing methods for LLMs are primarily designed for static corpora and can suffer sharp performance drops under dynamically evolving recommendation data. To address these challenges, we propose Inherit4Rec, a parameter-inheritance framework that supports both Dense-to-Dense (D2D) growth and Dense-to-Sparse (D2S) conversion. Inherit4Rec-D2D combines hybrid growth with asymmetric training to preserve the forward function at expansion and maintain update continuity. Inherit4Rec-D2S constructs SMoE networks through co-activation-aware partitioning with a load-balancing loss, preserving dense-model capabilities while promoting balanced expert activation. Experiments on KuaiRand-1K and an industrial short-video recommendation dataset show that both transformations consistently outperform the SOTA inheritance baselines across all prediction objectives. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Inherit4Rec for continual capacity expansion and computation-efficient sparse conversion in industrial recommender systems.
Vision Transformer (ViT) classifiers commonly rely on a global classification (CLS) token for image-level prediction, which is poorly aligned with local interpretability requirements in medical imaging. We propose SAP-ViT, a Self-Attributing Patch Vision Transformer that replaces CLS-based classification with direct aggregation of last-layer patch embeddings. This design makes class predictions decomposable into patch-level contributions as part of the forward pass. To encourage concise and readable evidence, SAP-ViT applies sparsity regularization to the patch-weight distribution. Since self-attention mixes information across patch tokens, we further introduce an input-space back-mapping mechanism to estimate which input patches contribute to influential output patch embeddings. We evaluate SAP-ViT qualitatively and quantitatively on multiple medical image classification datasets spanning different imaging modalities. The results show that SAP-ViT maintains strong classification performance while providing consistent and interpretable patch-level explanations across datasets. Ablation results further show that both sparsity regularization and the alignment component of input-space back-mapping contribute to the final explanation quality. Overall, SAP-ViT provides a favorable trade-off between predictive accuracy and interpretability for ViT-based medical image classification.
The powerful generative capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) has instigated a paradigm shift in recommendation. However, existing generative models (e.g., OneRec) operate as implicit predictors, critically lacking the capacity for explicit and controllable reasoning—a key advantage of LLMs. To bridge this gap, we propose OneRec-Think, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates dialogue, reasoning, and personalized recommendation. OneRec-Think incorporates: (1) Itemic Alignment: cross-modal Item-Textual Alignment for semantic grounding; (2) Reasoning Activation: Reasoning Scaffolding to activate LLM reasoning within the recommendation context; and (3) Reasoning Enhancement, where we design a recommendation-specific reward function that accounts for the multi-validity nature of user preferences. Experiments across public benchmarks show state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, our proposed “Think-Ahead” architecture enables effective industrial deployment, achieving a 0.159% gain in APP Stay Time and validating the practical efficacy of the model’s explicit reasoning capability.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Knowledge editing aims to modify outdated knowledge in language models efficiently while retaining their original capabilities. Mainstream datasets for knowledge editing are predominantly static and fail to keep in pace with the evolving real-world knowledge. In this work, we introduce CRAFT, an ever-evolving real-world dataset for knowledge editing. It evaluates models on temporal locality, common-sense locality, composite portability and alias portability, providing a comprehensive and challenging evaluation for knowledge editing, on which previous methods hardly achieve balanced performance. Towards flexible real-time knowledge editing, we propose KEDAS, a novel paradigm of knowledge editing alignment featuring diverse edit augmentation and self-adaptive post-alignment inference, exhibiting significant performance gain on both CRAFT and traditional datasets compared to previous methods. We hope this work may serve as a catalyst for shifting the focus of knowledge editing from static update to dynamic evolution.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly boosted the reasoning capability of language models (LMs). However, existing RLVR approaches train LMs based on their own on-policy responses and are constrained by the initial capability of LMs, thus prone to exploration stagnation, in which LMs fail to solve more training problems and cannot further learn from the training data. Some approaches try to address this by leveraging off-policy solutions to training problems, but rely on external expert guidance that is limited in availability and scalability. In this work, we propose LTE (Learning to reason from Trial and Error), an approach that hints LMs with their previously self-made mistakes, not requiring any external expert guidance. Experiments validate the effectiveness of LTE, which outperforms the normal group relative policy optimization (GRPO) by 5.02 in Pass@1 and 9.96 in Pass@k on average across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks for Qwen3-8B-Base and even performs better than methods that require external guidance. Further analysis confirms that LTE successfully mitigates exploration stagnation and enhances both exploitation and exploration during training. Our code is available at https://github.com/JamyDon/LTE.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Qian Cao, Yahui Liu, Wei Bi Independent Researcher, Yi Zhao, Ruihua Song, Xiting Wang Renmin University of China, Ruiming Tang, Guorui Zhou Kuaishou- 快手科技 等 9 位作者
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.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
AI 速览：ToolACE提出一种自动化的智能体流水线，用于生成准确、复杂且多样的工具学习数据，以提升大语言模型的函数调用能力。
Function calling significantly extends the application boundary of large language models, where high-quality and diverse training data is critical for unlocking this capability. However, real function-calling data is quite challenging to collect and annotate, while synthetic data generated by existing pipelines tends to lack coverage and accuracy. In this paper, we present ToolACE, an automatic agentic pipeline designed to generate accurate, complex, and diverse tool-learning data. ToolACE leverages a novel self-evolution synthesis process to curate a comprehensive API pool of 26,507 diverse APIs. Dialogs are further generated through the interplay among multiple agents, guided by a formalized thinking process. To ensure data accuracy, we implement a dual-layer verification system combining rule-based and model-based checks. We demonstrate that models trained on our synthesized data, even with only 8B parameters, achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard, rivaling the latest GPT-4 models. Our model and a subset of the data are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/Team-ACE.