Large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape recommendations across chatbots, e-commerce, and user-generated content (UGC) platforms, creating demand for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to improve item visibility in generated responses. Existing GEO studies are mainly content-centric, optimizing visibility under general-purpose queries. However, a shared item description usually serves users with different needs and decision goals, resulting in its visibility gains being dependent on the request. To investigate how changing intent affects visibility, we formulate IntentGEO to evaluate shared rewrites across need specificity and decision progression. We revisit existing GEO methods and find that their visibility gains vary across user intents. More critically, learning-based prompt optimization can underperform its handwritten seed on average. Tracing these updates reveals prompt drift from explicit recommendation instructions toward generic promotional tactics. To address this drift, we propose AMO (Anchored Meta-Optimization), which preserves recommendation instructions in a fixed core while learning appended strategies from citation feedback. Across four domains and ten intent states, AMO improves average citation-rank gain by 35% over the strongest prior learning-based baseline and leads on nine states. Ablations show that learned additions improve on the fixed core alone and that AMO outperforms full-prompt optimization initialized from that core. It also achieves the highest gains in an agentic recommendation pipeline and, after separate adaptation, on Doubao, a commercially deployed, closed-source online assistant. These findings highlight user intent as a key dimension of GEO evaluation and support anchored adaptation across recommendation needs and decision stages.
Shiqi Zhang, Guochen Zhou, Zesheng Wei, Hai Zhao, Zhisong Zhang
Web agents are typically evaluated with goals fully specified before execution and fixed thereafter, whereas real users often revise their requirements during interaction. To study such interactions, we introduce DynaRev, a benchmark of 181 tasks to evaluate web agents under dynamic goal revision. DynaRev uses semantic milestones to deliver revisions at task-defined stages, covers additive revisions, unconditional overrides, and runtime-conditioned overrides, and evaluates correctness, responsiveness, and efficiency through trajectory-grounded evaluation. Five-model evaluations show that agents often satisfy only part of the task requirements, with performance varying across task sources, revision types, and models. Further analyses reveal varied milestone timing, mixed effects of dynamic delivery, and contrasting revision-handling outcomes, with gains from instruction rewriting while preserving browser state and losses from browser resets. DynaRev provides a testbed for studying how web agents adapt to evolving user goals. The code and data are available at https://github.com/zsq259/DynaRev.
Active learning (AL) reduces annotation by querying informative examples. Continual active learning (CAL) also cuts the training cost, the total number of gradient steps, by training one model across AL rounds with a fixed number of mini-batch steps per round. Pseudo-labels add supervision without annotation, but they increase training cost. In CAL, where every round trains on a fixed number of mini-batches, whether and how pseudo-labeled examples should share these mini-batches with labeled examples is therefore open. We provide the first formalization of this problem as two decisions after each query, namely (i) which unlabeled examples should enter training with a pseudo-label and (ii) what share of each mini-batch they should take. Our method, semi-supervised continual active learning (SSCAL), works with any acquisition function. It admits pseudo-labels based on distances from unlabeled examples to labeled neighbors, caps their share, and reweights the loss on labeled examples to keep their expected gradient contribution unchanged. On frozen embeddings, its pseudo-labeler updates incrementally without extra model forward passes. Across two audio datasets, two frozen encoders, six acquisition functions and ten seeds, SSCAL ranks first on average among four protocols with equal training steps, answering the question affirmatively.
Audio active learning (AL) trains a classifier at low annotation cost by labeling only an informative fraction of an unlabeled collection over successive rounds. Each round picks one of the checkpoints saved during training. Mainstream AL protocols do so with an assumed validation set, but in practice its labels also count toward the annotation cost, shrinking the advantage of an already small annotation budget. We propose geometric consistency, a label-free validation rule for checkpoint selection. Both classifiers, nearest-class-mean and k-nearest-neighbor, are built from the labeled set in a frozen pretrained embedding space. They then predict the unlabeled data to model its geometry. The rule scores each checkpoint by its agreement with these pseudo-labels and its cross-entropy on the labeled set. It works with any query strategy, has one hyperparameter, insensitive in practice, and adds only one batched forward pass over the unlabeled data per round. At matched label budgets across datasets, encoders, and query strategies, it attains the best mean rank in area under the labeling curve (AULC) among methods without extra labels and is on par with an out-of-budget validation set. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of label-free validation for checkpoint selection in audio AL.