Daily Papers

Existing benchmarks for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) primarily evaluate spatio-temporal understanding on simple single-action videos, closed attribute sets and restricted entity types, failing to capture the freeform, multi-action interactions between diverse entities which characterize real-world video understanding. Furthermore, the lack of a systematic framework for analyzing model failures across complementary spatio-temporal axes hinders comprehensive evaluation. To address these gaps, we introduce VISTA, a Video Interaction Spatio-Temporal Analysis benchmark designed for open-set, multi-entity and multi-action spatio-temporal understanding in VLMs. VISTA decomposes videos into interpretable entities, their associated actions, and relational dynamics, enabling multi-axis diagnostics and unified assessment of relational, spatial, and temporal understanding. Our benchmark integrates multiple datasets into a single interaction-aware taxonomy and comprises ~12K curated video-query pairs spanning diverse scenes and complexities. We systematically evaluate 11 state-of-the-art VLMs on VISTA, and break down aggregate performance across our taxonomy to reveal shortcomings and pronounced spatio-temporal biases obscured by traditional metrics. By providing detailed, taxonomy-driven diagnostics on a challenging dataset, VISTA offers a nuanced framework to guide advances in model design, pretraining strategies, and evaluation protocols. Overall, VISTA is the first, large-scale, interaction-aware diagnostic benchmark for spatio-temporal understanding in VLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as scalable tools for mental health counseling, yet evaluating their safety remains challenging due to the interactional and context-dependent nature of clinical harm. Existing evaluation frameworks predominantly assess isolated responses using coarse-grained taxonomies or static datasets, limiting their ability to diagnose how harms emerge and accumulate over multi-turn counseling interactions. In this work, we introduce R-MHSafe, a role-aware mental health safety taxonomy that characterizes clinically significant harm in terms of the interactional roles an AI counselor adopts, including perpetrator, instigator, facilitator, or enabler, combined with clinically grounded harm categories. Then, we propose MHSafeEval, a closed-loop, agent-based evaluation framework that formulates safety assessment as trajectory-level discovery of harm through adversarial multi-turn interactions, guided by role-aware modeling. Using R-MHSafe and MHSafeEval, we conduct a large-scale evaluation across state-of-the-art LLMs. Our results reveal substantial role-dependent and cumulative safety failures that are systematically missed by existing static benchmarks, and show that our framework significantly improves failure-mode coverage and diagnostic granularity.

This work presents an unsupervised method for automatically constructing and expanding topic taxonomies by using instruction-based fine-tuned LLMs (Large Language Models). We apply topic modeling and keyword extraction techniques to create initial topic taxonomies and LLMs to post-process the resulting terms and create a hierarchy. To expand an existing taxonomy with new terms, we use zero-shot prompting to find out where to add new nodes, which, to our knowledge, is the first work to present such an approach to taxonomy tasks. We use the resulting taxonomies to assign tags that characterize merchants from a retail bank dataset. To evaluate our work, we asked 12 volunteers to answer a two-part form in which we first assessed the quality of the taxonomies created and then the tags assigned to merchants based on that taxonomy. The evaluation revealed a coherence rate exceeding 90% for the chosen taxonomies, while the average coherence for merchant tagging surpassed 80%.

Personalization of Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently become increasingly important with a wide range of applications. Despite the importance and recent progress, most existing works on personalized LLMs have focused either entirely on (a) personalized text generation or (b) leveraging LLMs for personalization-related downstream applications, such as recommendation systems. In this work, we bridge the gap between these two separate main directions for the first time by introducing a taxonomy for personalized LLM usage and summarizing the key differences and challenges. We provide a formalization of the foundations of personalized LLMs that consolidates and expands notions of personalization of LLMs, defining and discussing novel facets of personalization, usage, and desiderata of personalized LLMs. We then unify the literature across these diverse fields and usage scenarios by proposing systematic taxonomies for the granularity of personalization, personalization techniques, datasets, evaluation methods, and applications of personalized LLMs. Finally, we highlight challenges and important open problems that remain to be addressed. By unifying and surveying recent research using the proposed taxonomies, we aim to provide a clear guide to the existing literature and different facets of personalization in LLMs, empowering both researchers and practitioners.

With advances in generative AI, there is increasing work towards creating autonomous agents that can manage daily tasks by operating user interfaces (UIs). While prior research has studied the mechanics of how AI agents might navigate UIs and understand UI structure, the effects of agents and their autonomous actions-particularly those that may be risky or irreversible-remain under-explored. In this work, we investigate the real-world impacts and consequences of UI actions by AI agents. We began by developing a taxonomy of the impacts of UI actions through a series of workshops with domain experts. Following this, we conducted a data synthesis study to gather realistic UI screen traces and action data that users perceive as impactful. We then used our impact categories to annotate our collected data and data repurposed from existing UI navigation datasets. Our quantitative evaluations of different large language models (LLMs) and variants demonstrate how well different LLMs can understand the impacts of UI actions that might be taken by an agent. We show that our taxonomy enhances the reasoning capabilities of these LLMs for understanding the impacts of UI actions, but our findings also reveal significant gaps in their ability to reliably classify more nuanced or complex categories of impact.

Recent interest in human-AI interactions in agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) has grown rapidly due to the widespread utilization of large language models (LLMs). ABMS is an intelligent approach that simulates autonomous agents' behaviors within a defined environment to research emergent phenomena. Integrating LLMs into ABMS enables natural language interaction between humans and models. Meanwhile, it introduces new challenges that rely on human interaction to address. Human involvement can assist ABMS in adapting to flexible and complex research demands. However, systematic reviews of interactions that examine how humans and AI interact in ABMS are lacking. In this paper, we investigate existing works and propose a novel taxonomy to categorize the interactions derived from them. Specifically, human users refer to researchers who utilize ABMS tools to conduct their studies in our survey. We decompose interactions into five dimensions: the goals that users want to achieve (Why), the phases that users are involved (When), the components of the system (What), the roles of users (Who), and the means of interactions (How). Our analysis summarizes the findings that reveal existing interaction patterns. They provide researchers who develop interactions with comprehensive guidance on how humans and AI interact. We further discuss the unexplored interactions and suggest future research directions.

Recommender systems play a significant role in information filtering and have been utilized in different scenarios, such as e-commerce and social media. With the prosperity of deep learning, deep recommender systems show superior performance by capturing non-linear information and item-user relationships. However, the design of deep recommender systems heavily relies on human experiences and expert knowledge. To tackle this problem, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is introduced to automatically search for the proper candidates for different parts of deep recommender systems. This survey performs a comprehensive review of the literature in this field. Firstly, we propose an abstract concept for AutoML for deep recommender systems (AutoRecSys) that describes its building blocks and distinguishes it from conventional AutoML techniques and recommender systems. Secondly, we present a taxonomy as a classification framework containing feature selection search, embedding dimension search, feature interaction search, model architecture search, and other components search. Furthermore, we put a particular emphasis on the search space and search strategy, as they are the common thread to connect all methods within each category and enable practitioners to analyze and compare various approaches. Finally, we propose four future promising research directions that will lead this line of research.

While LLMs have shown great success in understanding and generating text in traditional conversational settings, their potential for performing ill-defined complex tasks is largely under-studied. Indeed, we are yet to conduct comprehensive benchmarking studies with multiple LLMs that are exclusively focused on a complex task. However, conducting such benchmarking studies is challenging because of the large variations in LLMs' performance when different prompt types/styles are used and different degrees of detail are provided in the prompts. To address this issue, the paper proposes a general taxonomy that can be used to design prompts with specific properties in order to perform a wide range of complex tasks. This taxonomy will allow future benchmarking studies to report the specific categories of prompts used as part of the study, enabling meaningful comparisons across different studies. Also, by establishing a common standard through this taxonomy, researchers will be able to draw more accurate conclusions about LLMs' performance on a specific complex task.

Taxonomy is a hierarchically structured knowledge graph that plays a crucial role in machine intelligence. The taxonomy expansion task aims to find a position for a new term in an existing taxonomy to capture the emerging knowledge in the world and keep the taxonomy dynamically updated. Previous taxonomy expansion solutions neglect valuable information brought by the hierarchical structure and evaluate the correctness of merely an added edge, which downgrade the problem to node-pair scoring or mini-path classification. In this paper, we propose the Hierarchy Expansion Framework (HEF), which fully exploits the hierarchical structure's properties to maximize the coherence of expanded taxonomy. HEF makes use of taxonomy's hierarchical structure in multiple aspects: i) HEF utilizes subtrees containing most relevant nodes as self-supervision data for a complete comparison of parental and sibling relations; ii) HEF adopts a coherence modeling module to evaluate the coherence of a taxonomy's subtree by integrating hypernymy relation detection and several tree-exclusive features; iii) HEF introduces the Fitting Score for position selection, which explicitly evaluates both path and level selections and takes full advantage of parental relations to interchange information for disambiguation and self-correction. Extensive experiments show that by better exploiting the hierarchical structure and optimizing taxonomy's coherence, HEF vastly surpasses the prior state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets by an average improvement of 46.7% in accuracy and 32.3% in mean reciprocal rank.

Digital advances have transformed the face of automatic music generation since its beginnings at the dawn of computing. Despite the many breakthroughs, issues such as the musical tasks targeted by different machines and the degree to which they succeed remain open questions. We present a functional taxonomy for music generation systems with reference to existing systems. The taxonomy organizes systems according to the purposes for which they were designed. It also reveals the inter-relatedness amongst the systems. This design-centered approach contrasts with predominant methods-based surveys and facilitates the identification of grand challenges to set the stage for new breakthroughs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can be seen as compressed knowledge bases, but it remains unclear what knowledge they truly contain and how far their knowledge boundaries extend. Existing benchmarks are mostly static and provide limited support for systematic knowledge probing. In this paper, we propose an interactive agentic framework to systematically extract and quantify the knowledge of LLMs. Our method includes four adaptive exploration policies to probe knowledge at different granularities. To ensure the quality of extracted knowledge, we introduce a three-stage knowledge processing pipeline that combines vector-based filtering to remove exact duplicates, LLM-based adjudication to resolve ambiguous semantic overlaps, and domain-relevance auditing to retain valid knowledge units. Through extensive experiments, we find that recursive taxonomy is the most effective exploration strategy. We also observe a clear knowledge scaling law, where larger models consistently extract more knowledge. In addition, we identify a Pass@1-versus-Pass@k trade-off: domain-specialized models achieve higher initial accuracy but degrade rapidly, while general-purpose models maintain stable performance during extended extraction. Finally, our results show that differences in training data composition lead to distinct and measurable knowledge profiles across model families.

The rapid evolution of scientific fields introduces challenges in organizing and retrieving scientific literature. While expert-curated taxonomies have traditionally addressed this need, the process is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, recent automatic taxonomy construction methods either (1) over-rely on a specific corpus, sacrificing generalizability, or (2) depend heavily on the general knowledge of large language models (LLMs) contained within their pre-training datasets, often overlooking the dynamic nature of evolving scientific domains. Additionally, these approaches fail to account for the multi-faceted nature of scientific literature, where a single research paper may contribute to multiple dimensions (e.g., methodology, new tasks, evaluation metrics, benchmarks). To address these gaps, we propose TaxoAdapt, a framework that dynamically adapts an LLM-generated taxonomy to a given corpus across multiple dimensions. TaxoAdapt performs iterative hierarchical classification, expanding both the taxonomy width and depth based on corpus' topical distribution. We demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of computer science conferences over the years to showcase its ability to structure and capture the evolution of scientific fields. As a multidimensional method, TaxoAdapt generates taxonomies that are 26.51% more granularity-preserving and 50.41% more coherent than the most competitive baselines judged by LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on single-turn text-to-SQL tasks, but real-world database applications predominantly require multi-turn interactions to handle ambiguous queries, execution errors, and evolving user requirements. Existing multi-turn benchmarks fall short by treating conversation histories as static context or limiting evaluation to read-only operations, failing to reflect production-grade database assistant challenges. We introduce BIRD-INTERACT, a benchmark that restores this realism through: (1) a comprehensive interaction environment coupling each database with a hierarchical knowledge base, metadata files, and a function-driven user simulator, enabling models to solicit clarifications, retrieve knowledge, and recover from errors without human supervision; (2) two evaluation settings consisting of a pre-defined conversational protocol (c-Interact) and an open-ended agentic setting (a-Interact) where models autonomously decide when to query the user simulator or explore the environment; (3) a challenging task suite covering the full CRUD spectrum for business-intelligence and operational use cases, guarded by executable test cases. Each task features ambiguous and follow-up sub-tasks requiring dynamic interaction. The suite comprises BIRD-INTERACT-FULL (600 tasks, up to 11,796 interactions) for comprehensive performance assessment, and BIRD-INTERACT-LITE (300 tasks with simplified databases) for detailed behavioral analysis and rapid method development. Our empirical results highlight BIRD-INTERACT's difficulty: GPT-5 completes only 8.67% of tasks in c-Interact and 17.00% in a-Interact. Analysis via memory grafting and Interaction Test-time Scaling validates the importance of effective interaction for complex, dynamic text-to-SQL tasks.

Language agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in web search and information retrieval. However, these search agents assume user queries are complete and unambiguous, an assumption that diverges from reality where users begin with incomplete queries requiring clarification through interaction. Yet most agents lack interactive mechanisms during the search process, and existing benchmarks cannot assess this capability. To address this gap, we introduce InteractComp, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether search agents can recognize query ambiguity and actively interact to resolve it during search. Following the principle of easy to verify, interact to disambiguate, we construct 210 expert-curated questions across 9 domains through a target-distractor methodology that creates genuine ambiguity resolvable only through interaction. Evaluation of 17 models reveals striking failure: the best model achieves only 13.73% accuracy despite 71.50% with complete context, exposing systematic overconfidence rather than reasoning deficits. Forced interaction produces dramatic gains, demonstrating latent capability current strategies fail to engage. Longitudinal analysis shows interaction capabilities stagnated over 15 months while search performance improved seven-fold, revealing a critical blind spot. This stagnation, coupled with the immediate feedback inherent to search tasks, makes InteractComp a valuable resource for both evaluating and training interaction capabilities in search agents. The code is available at https://github.com/FoundationAgents/InteractComp.

We present a comprehensive system for addressing Tasks A, B, and C of the LLMs4OL 2025 challenge, which together span the full ontology construction pipeline: term extraction, typing, and taxonomy discovery. Our approach combines retrieval-augmented prompting, zero-shot classification, and attention-based graph modeling -- each tailored to the demands of the respective task. For Task A, we jointly extract domain-specific terms and their ontological types using a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. Training data was reformulated into a document to terms and types correspondence, while test-time inference leverages semantically similar training examples. This single-pass method requires no model finetuning and improves overall performance through lexical augmentation Task B, which involves assigning types to given terms, is handled via a dual strategy. In the few-shot setting (for domains with labeled training data), we reuse the RAG scheme with few-shot prompting. In the zero-shot setting (for previously unseen domains), we use a zero-shot classifier that combines cosine similarity scores from multiple embedding models using confidence-based weighting. In Task C, we model taxonomy discovery as graph inference. Using embeddings of type labels, we train a lightweight cross-attention layer to predict is-a relations by approximating a soft adjacency matrix. These modular, task-specific solutions enabled us to achieve top-ranking results in the official leaderboard across all three tasks. Taken together these strategies showcase the scalability, adaptability, and robustness of LLM-based architectures for ontology learning across heterogeneous domains. Code is available at: https://github.com/BelyaevaAlex/LLMs4OL-Challenge-Alexbek

Conversational search is an approach to information retrieval (IR), where users engage in a dialogue with an agent in order to satisfy their information needs. Previous conceptual work described properties and actions a good agent should exhibit. Unlike them, we present a novel conceptual model defined in terms of conversational goals, which enables us to reason about current research practices in conversational search. Based on the literature, we elicit how existing tasks and test collections from the fields of IR, natural language processing (NLP) and dialogue systems (DS) fit into this model. We describe a set of characteristics that an ideal conversational search dataset should have. Lastly, we introduce MANtIS (the code and dataset are available at https://guzpenha.github.io/MANtIS/), a large-scale dataset containing multi-domain and grounded information seeking dialogues that fulfill all of our dataset desiderata. We provide baseline results for the conversation response ranking and user intent prediction tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in important tasks such as natural language understanding, language generation, and complex reasoning and have the potential to make a substantial impact on our society. Such capabilities, however, come with the considerable resources they demand, highlighting the strong need to develop effective techniques for addressing their efficiency challenges. In this survey, we provide a systematic and comprehensive review of efficient LLMs research. We organize the literature in a taxonomy consisting of three main categories, covering distinct yet interconnected efficient LLMs topics from model-centric, data-centric, and framework-centric perspective, respectively. We have also created a GitHub repository where we compile the papers featured in this survey at https://github.com/AIoT-MLSys-Lab/EfficientLLMs, and will actively maintain this repository and incorporate new research as it emerges. We hope our survey can serve as a valuable resource to help researchers and practitioners gain a systematic understanding of the research developments in efficient LLMs and inspire them to contribute to this important and exciting field.

We introduce the use of Poincar\'e embeddings to improve existing state-of-the-art approaches to domain-specific taxonomy induction from text as a signal for both relocating wrong hyponym terms within a (pre-induced) taxonomy as well as for attaching disconnected terms in a taxonomy. This method substantially improves previous state-of-the-art results on the SemEval-2016 Task 13 on taxonomy extraction. We demonstrate the superiority of Poincar\'e embeddings over distributional semantic representations, supporting the hypothesis that they can better capture hierarchical lexical-semantic relationships than embeddings in the Euclidean space.

Data preparation aims to denoise raw datasets, uncover cross-dataset relationships, and extract valuable insights from them, which is essential for a wide range of data-centric applications. Driven by (i) rising demands for application-ready data (e.g., for analytics, visualization, decision-making), (ii) increasingly powerful LLM techniques, and (iii) the emergence of infrastructures that facilitate flexible agent construction (e.g., using Databricks Unity Catalog), LLM-enhanced methods are rapidly becoming a transformative and potentially dominant paradigm for data preparation. By investigating hundreds of recent literature works, this paper presents a systematic review of this evolving landscape, focusing on the use of LLM techniques to prepare data for diverse downstream tasks. First, we characterize the fundamental paradigm shift, from rule-based, model-specific pipelines to prompt-driven, context-aware, and agentic preparation workflows. Next, we introduce a task-centric taxonomy that organizes the field into three major tasks: data cleaning (e.g., standardization, error processing, imputation), data integration (e.g., entity matching, schema matching), and data enrichment (e.g., data annotation, profiling). For each task, we survey representative techniques, and highlight their respective strengths (e.g., improved generalization, semantic understanding) and limitations (e.g., the prohibitive cost of scaling LLMs, persistent hallucinations even in advanced agents, the mismatch between advanced methods and weak evaluation). Moreover, we analyze commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics (the empirical part). Finally, we discuss open research challenges and outline a forward-looking roadmap that emphasizes scalable LLM-data systems, principled designs for reliable agentic workflows, and robust evaluation protocols.

E-commerce platforms categorize their products into a multi-level taxonomy tree with thousands of leaf categories. Conventional methods for product categorization are typically based on machine learning classification algorithms. These algorithms take product information as input (e.g., titles and descriptions) to classify a product into a leaf category. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm based on machine translation. In our approach, we translate a product's natural language description into a sequence of tokens representing a root-to-leaf path in a product taxonomy. In our experiments on two large real-world datasets, we show that our approach achieves better predictive accuracy than a state-of-the-art classification system for product categorization. In addition, we demonstrate that our machine translation models can propose meaningful new paths between previously unconnected nodes in a taxonomy tree, thereby transforming the taxonomy into a directed acyclic graph (DAG). We discuss how the resultant taxonomy DAG promotes user-friendly navigation, and how it is more adaptable to new products.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) generate recommendations through an interactive process. However, not all CRS approaches use human conversations as their source of interaction data; the majority of prior CRS work simulates interactions by exchanging entity-level information. As a result, claims of prior CRS work do not generalise to real-world settings where conversations take unexpected turns, or where conversational and intent understanding is not perfect. To tackle this challenge, the research community has started to examine holistic CRS, which are trained using conversational data collected from real-world scenarios. Despite their emergence, such holistic approaches are under-explored. We present a comprehensive survey of holistic CRS methods by summarizing the literature in a structured manner. Our survey recognises holistic CRS approaches as having three components: 1) a backbone language model, the optional use of 2) external knowledge, and/or 3) external guidance. We also give a detailed analysis of CRS datasets and evaluation methods in real application scenarios. We offer our insight as to the current challenges of holistic CRS and possible future trends.

Interactive Natural Language Processing (iNLP) has emerged as a novel paradigm within the field of NLP, aimed at addressing limitations in existing frameworks while aligning with the ultimate goals of artificial intelligence. This paradigm considers language models as agents capable of observing, acting, and receiving feedback iteratively from external entities. Specifically, language models in this context can: (1) interact with humans for better understanding and addressing user needs, personalizing responses, aligning with human values, and improving the overall user experience; (2) interact with knowledge bases for enriching language representations with factual knowledge, enhancing the contextual relevance of responses, and dynamically leveraging external information to generate more accurate and informed responses; (3) interact with models and tools for effectively decomposing and addressing complex tasks, leveraging specialized expertise for specific subtasks, and fostering the simulation of social behaviors; and (4) interact with environments for learning grounded representations of language, and effectively tackling embodied tasks such as reasoning, planning, and decision-making in response to environmental observations. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of iNLP, starting by proposing a unified definition and framework of the concept. We then provide a systematic classification of iNLP, dissecting its various components, including interactive objects, interaction interfaces, and interaction methods. We proceed to delve into the evaluation methodologies used in the field, explore its diverse applications, scrutinize its ethical and safety issues, and discuss prospective research directions. This survey serves as an entry point for researchers who are interested in this rapidly evolving area and offers a broad view of the current landscape and future trajectory of iNLP.

User simulation has long played a vital role in computer science due to its potential to support a wide range of applications. Language, as the primary medium of human communication, forms the foundation of social interaction and behavior. Consequently, simulating conversational behavior has become a key area of study. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly catalyzed progress in this domain by enabling high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. In this paper, we survey recent advancements in LLM-based conversational user simulation. We introduce a novel taxonomy covering user granularity and simulation objectives. Additionally, we systematically analyze core techniques and evaluation methodologies. We aim to keep the research community informed of the latest advancements in conversational user simulation and to further facilitate future research by identifying open challenges and organizing existing work under a unified framework.

The rise of LLM-based agents has opened new frontiers in AI applications, yet evaluating these agents remains a complex and underdeveloped area. This survey provides an in-depth overview of the emerging field of LLM agent evaluation, introducing a two-dimensional taxonomy that organizes existing work along (1) evaluation objectives -- what to evaluate, such as agent behavior, capabilities, reliability, and safety -- and (2) evaluation process -- how to evaluate, including interaction modes, datasets and benchmarks, metric computation methods, and tooling. In addition to taxonomy, we highlight enterprise-specific challenges, such as role-based access to data, the need for reliability guarantees, dynamic and long-horizon interactions, and compliance, which are often overlooked in current research. We also identify future research directions, including holistic, more realistic, and scalable evaluation. This work aims to bring clarity to the fragmented landscape of agent evaluation and provide a framework for systematic assessment, enabling researchers and practitioners to evaluate LLM agents for real-world deployment.

The applications of generative AI have become extremely impressive, and the interplay between users and AI is even more so. Current human-AI interaction literature has taken a broad look at how humans interact with generative AI, but it lacks specificity regarding the user interface designs and patterns used to create these applications. Therefore, we present a survey that comprehensively presents taxonomies of how a human interacts with AI and the user interaction patterns designed to meet the needs of a variety of relevant use cases. We focus primarily on user-guided interactions, surveying interactions that are initiated by the user and do not include any implicit signals given by the user. With this survey, we aim to create a compendium of different user-interaction patterns that can be used as a reference for designers and developers alike. In doing so, we also strive to lower the entry barrier for those attempting to learn more about the design of generative AI applications.

Extracting structured knowledge from product profiles is crucial for various applications in e-Commerce. State-of-the-art approaches for knowledge extraction were each designed for a single category of product, and thus do not apply to real-life e-Commerce scenarios, which often contain thousands of diverse categories. This paper proposes TXtract, a taxonomy-aware knowledge extraction model that applies to thousands of product categories organized in a hierarchical taxonomy. Through category conditional self-attention and multi-task learning, our approach is both scalable, as it trains a single model for thousands of categories, and effective, as it extracts category-specific attribute values. Experiments on products from a taxonomy with 4,000 categories show that TXtract outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by up to 10% in F1 and 15% in coverage across all categories.

We investigate the utility of Large Language Models for automated taxonomy generation and completion specifically applied to taxonomies from the food technology industry. We explore the extent to which taxonomies can be completed from a seed taxonomy or generated without a seed from a set of known concepts, in an iterative fashion using recent prompting techniques. Experiments on five taxonomies using an open-source LLM (Llama-3), while promising, point to the difficulty of correctly placing inner nodes.

This paper explores the feasibility of using text-to-image models in a zero-shot setup to generate images for taxonomy concepts. While text-based methods for taxonomy enrichment are well-established, the potential of the visual dimension remains unexplored. To address this, we propose a comprehensive benchmark for Taxonomy Image Generation that assesses models' abilities to understand taxonomy concepts and generate relevant, high-quality images. The benchmark includes common-sense and randomly sampled WordNet concepts, alongside the LLM generated predictions. The 12 models are evaluated using 9 novel taxonomy-related text-to-image metrics and human feedback. Moreover, we pioneer the use of pairwise evaluation with GPT-4 feedback for image generation. Experimental results show that the ranking of models differs significantly from standard T2I tasks. Playground-v2 and FLUX consistently outperform across metrics and subsets and the retrieval-based approach performs poorly. These findings highlight the potential for automating the curation of structured data resources.

With the rapid rise of large language models (LLMs), phone automation has undergone transformative changes. This paper systematically reviews LLM-driven phone GUI agents, highlighting their evolution from script-based automation to intelligent, adaptive systems. We first contextualize key challenges, (i) limited generality, (ii) high maintenance overhead, and (iii) weak intent comprehension, and show how LLMs address these issues through advanced language understanding, multimodal perception, and robust decision-making. We then propose a taxonomy covering fundamental agent frameworks (single-agent, multi-agent, plan-then-act), modeling approaches (prompt engineering, training-based), and essential datasets and benchmarks. Furthermore, we detail task-specific architectures, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning strategies that bridge user intent and GUI operations. Finally, we discuss open challenges such as dataset diversity, on-device deployment efficiency, user-centric adaptation, and security concerns, offering forward-looking insights into this rapidly evolving field. By providing a structured overview and identifying pressing research gaps, this paper serves as a definitive reference for researchers and practitioners seeking to harness LLMs in designing scalable, user-friendly phone GUI agents.

Recent advances in foundation models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), facilitate intelligent agents being capable of performing complex tasks. By leveraging the ability of (M)LLMs to process and interpret Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), these agents can autonomously execute user instructions by simulating human-like interactions such as clicking and typing. This survey consolidates recent research on (M)LLM-based GUI agents, highlighting key innovations in data, frameworks, and applications. We begin by discussing representative datasets and benchmarks. Next, we summarize a unified framework that captures the essential components used in prior research, accompanied by a taxonomy. Additionally, we explore commercial applications of (M)LLM-based GUI agents. Drawing from existing work, we identify several key challenges and propose future research directions. We hope this paper will inspire further developments in the field of (M)LLM-based GUI agents.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly enhanced LLMs by incorporating external information. However, prevailing agentic RAG approaches are constrained by a critical limitation: they treat the retrieval process as a black-box querying operation. This confines agents' actions to query issuing, hindering its ability to tackle complex information-seeking tasks. To address this, we introduce Interact-RAG, a new paradigm that elevates the LLM agent from a passive query issuer into an active manipulator of the retrieval process. We dismantle the black-box with a Corpus Interaction Engine, equipping the agent with a set of action primitives for fine-grained control over information retrieval. To further empower the agent on the entire RAG pipeline, we first develop a reasoning-enhanced workflow, which enables both zero-shot execution and the synthesis of interaction trajectories. We then leverage this synthetic data to train a fully autonomous end-to-end agent via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), followed by refinement with Reinforcement Learning (RL). Extensive experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate that Interact-RAG significantly outperforms other advanced methods, validating the efficacy of our reasoning-interaction strategy.

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is fundamentally determined by the contextual information provided during inference. This survey introduces Context Engineering, a formal discipline that transcends simple prompt design to encompass the systematic optimization of information payloads for LLMs. We present a comprehensive taxonomy decomposing Context Engineering into its foundational components and the sophisticated implementations that integrate them into intelligent systems. We first examine the foundational components: context retrieval and generation, context processing and context management. We then explore how these components are architecturally integrated to create sophisticated system implementations: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), memory systems and tool-integrated reasoning, and multi-agent systems. Through this systematic analysis of over 1300 research papers, our survey not only establishes a technical roadmap for the field but also reveals a critical research gap: a fundamental asymmetry exists between model capabilities. While current models, augmented by advanced context engineering, demonstrate remarkable proficiency in understanding complex contexts, they exhibit pronounced limitations in generating equally sophisticated, long-form outputs. Addressing this gap is a defining priority for future research. Ultimately, this survey provides a unified framework for both researchers and engineers advancing context-aware AI.

The exponential growth of scientific literature necessitates advanced tools for effective knowledge exploration. We present Knowledge Navigator, a system designed to enhance exploratory search abilities by organizing and structuring the retrieved documents from broad topical queries into a navigable, two-level hierarchy of named and descriptive scientific topics and subtopics. This structured organization provides an overall view of the research themes in a domain, while also enabling iterative search and deeper knowledge discovery within specific subtopics by allowing users to refine their focus and retrieve additional relevant documents. Knowledge Navigator combines LLM capabilities with cluster-based methods to enable an effective browsing method. We demonstrate our approach's effectiveness through automatic and manual evaluations on two novel benchmarks, CLUSTREC-COVID and SCITOC. Our code, prompts, and benchmarks are made publicly available.

Scientific literature is expanding at an unprecedented pace, making it increasingly challenging to efficiently organize and access domain knowledge. A high-quality scientific taxonomy offers a structured and hierarchical representation of a research field, facilitating literature exploration and topic navigation, as well as enabling downstream applications such as trend analysis, idea generation, and information retrieval. However, existing taxonomy generation approaches often suffer from structural inconsistencies and semantic misalignment across hierarchical levels. Through empirical analysis, we find that these issues largely stem from inadequate modeling of hierarchical semantic consistency. To address this limitation, we propose a semantic-consistent taxonomy generation (SC-Taxo) framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) with hierarchy-aware refinement stages to ensure semantic consistency. Specifically, SC-Taxo introduces a bidirectional heading generation mechanism that jointly performs bottom-up abstraction and top-down semantic constraint, while further capturing peer-level semantic dependencies to enhance horizontal consistency. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in hierarchy alignment and heading quality, and additional evaluation on Chinese scientific literature validates its robust cross-lingual generalization.

In this work, we dive into the fundamental challenges of evaluating Text2SQL solutions and highlight potential failure causes and the potential risks of relying on aggregate metrics in existing benchmarks. We identify two largely unaddressed limitations in current open benchmarks: (1) data quality issues in the evaluation data, mainly attributed to the lack of capturing the probabilistic nature of translating a natural language description into a structured query (e.g., NL ambiguity), and (2) the bias introduced by using different match functions as approximations for SQL equivalence. To put both limitations into context, we propose a unified taxonomy of all Text2SQL limitations that can lead to both prediction and evaluation errors. We then motivate the taxonomy by providing a survey of Text2SQL limitations using state-of-the-art Text2SQL solutions and benchmarks. We describe the causes of limitations with real-world examples and propose potential mitigation solutions for each category in the taxonomy. We conclude by highlighting the open challenges encountered when deploying such mitigation strategies or attempting to automatically apply the taxonomy.

Large language models (LLMs) have not only revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) but also have the potential to bring a paradigm shift in many other fields due to their remarkable abilities of language understanding, as well as impressive generalization capabilities and reasoning skills. As a result, recent studies have actively attempted to harness the power of LLMs to improve recommender systems, and it is imperative to thoroughly review the recent advances and challenges of LLM-based recommender systems. Unlike existing work, this survey does not merely analyze the classifications of LLM-based recommendation systems according to the technical framework of LLMs. Instead, it investigates how LLMs can better serve recommendation tasks from the perspective of the recommender system community, thus enhancing the integration of large language models into the research of recommender system and its practical application. In addition, the long-standing gap between academic research and industrial applications related to recommender systems has not been well discussed, especially in the era of large language models. In this review, we introduce a novel taxonomy that originates from the intrinsic essence of recommendation, delving into the application of large language model-based recommendation systems and their industrial implementation. Specifically, we propose a three-tier structure that more accurately reflects the developmental progression of recommendation systems from research to practical implementation, including representing and understanding, scheming and utilizing, and industrial deployment. Furthermore, we discuss critical challenges and opportunities in this emerging field. A more up-to-date version of the papers is maintained at: https://github.com/jindongli-Ai/Next-Generation-LLM-based-Recommender-Systems-Survey.

We present an elegant and effective approach for addressing limitations in existing multi-label classification models by incorporating interaction matching, a concept shown to be useful for ad-hoc search result ranking. By performing soft n-gram interaction matching, we match labels with natural language descriptions (which are common to have in most multi-labeling tasks). Our approach can be used to enhance existing multi-label classification approaches, which are biased toward frequently-occurring labels. We evaluate our approach on two challenging tasks: automatic medical coding of clinical notes and automatic labeling of entities from software tutorial text. Our results show that our method can yield up to an 11% relative improvement in macro performance, with most of the gains stemming labels that appear infrequently in the training set (i.e., the long tail of labels).

Recommender systems are embracing conversational technologies to obtain user preferences dynamically, and to overcome inherent limitations of their static models. A successful Conversational Recommender System (CRS) requires proper handling of interactions between conversation and recommendation. We argue that three fundamental problems need to be solved: 1) what questions to ask regarding item attributes, 2) when to recommend items, and 3) how to adapt to the users' online feedback. To the best of our knowledge, there lacks a unified framework that addresses these problems. In this work, we fill this missing interaction framework gap by proposing a new CRS framework named Estimation-Action-Reflection, or EAR, which consists of three stages to better converse with users. (1) Estimation, which builds predictive models to estimate user preference on both items and item attributes; (2) Action, which learns a dialogue policy to determine whether to ask attributes or recommend items, based on Estimation stage and conversation history; and (3) Reflection, which updates the recommender model when a user rejects the recommendations made by the Action stage. We present two conversation scenarios on binary and enumerated questions, and conduct extensive experiments on two datasets from Yelp and LastFM, for each scenario, respectively. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements over the state-of-the-art method CRM [32], corresponding to fewer conversation turns and a higher level of recommendation hits.

Climate change is a major socio-scientific issue shapes public decision-making and policy discussions. As large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as an interface for accessing climate knowledge, whether existing benchmarks reflect user needs is critical for evaluating LLM in real-world settings. We propose a Proactive Knowledge Behaviors Framework that captures the different human-human and human-AI knowledge seeking and provision behaviors. We further develop a Topic-Intent-Form taxonomy and apply it to analyze climate-related data representing different knowledge behaviors. Our results reveal a substantial mismatch between current benchmarks and real-world user needs, while knowledge interaction patterns between humans and LLMs closely resemble those in human-human interactions. These findings provide actionable guidance for benchmark design, RAG system development, and LLM training. Code is available at https://github.com/OuchengLiu/LLM-Misalign-Climate-Change.

User profiling has long been an important problem that investigates user interests in many real applications. Some recent works regard users and their interacted objects as entities of a graph and turn the problem into a node classification task. However, they neglect the difference of distinct interaction types, e.g. user clicks an item v.s.user purchases an item, and thus cannot incorporate such information well. To solve these issues, we propose to leverage the relation-aware heterogeneous graph method for user profiling, which also allows capturing significant meta relations. We adopt the query, key, and value mechanism in a transformer fashion for heterogeneous message passing so that entities can effectively interact with each other. Via such interactions on different relation types, our model can generate representations with rich information for the user profile prediction. We conduct experiments on two real-world e-commerce datasets and observe a significant performance boost of our approach.

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs), particularly in reasoning capabilities, have propelled Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to unprecedented levels. By synergizing retrieval mechanisms with advanced reasoning, LLMs can now tackle increasingly complex problems. This paper presents a systematic review of the collaborative interplay between RAG and reasoning, clearly defining "reasoning" within the RAG context. It construct a comprehensive taxonomy encompassing multi-dimensional collaborative objectives, representative paradigms, and technical implementations, and analyze the bidirectional synergy methods. Additionally, we critically evaluate current limitations in RAG assessment, including the absence of intermediate supervision for multi-step reasoning and practical challenges related to cost-risk trade-offs. To bridge theory and practice, we provide practical guidelines tailored to diverse real-world applications. Finally, we identify promising research directions, such as graph-based knowledge integration, hybrid model collaboration, and RL-driven optimization. Overall, this work presents a theoretical framework and practical foundation to advance RAG systems in academia and industry, fostering the next generation of RAG solutions.

Methods for making high-quality recommendations often rely on learning latent representations from interaction data. These methods, while performant, do not provide ready mechanisms for users to control the recommendation they receive. Our work tackles this problem by proposing LACE, a novel concept value bottleneck model for controllable text recommendations. LACE represents each user with a succinct set of human-readable concepts through retrieval given user-interacted documents and learns personalized representations of the concepts based on user documents. This concept based user profile is then leveraged to make recommendations. The design of our model affords control over the recommendations through a number of intuitive interactions with a transparent user profile. We first establish the quality of recommendations obtained from LACE in an offline evaluation on three recommendation tasks spanning six datasets in warm-start, cold-start, and zero-shot setups. Next, we validate the controllability of LACE under simulated user interactions. Finally, we implement LACE in an interactive controllable recommender system and conduct a user study to demonstrate that users are able to improve the quality of recommendations they receive through interactions with an editable user profile.

Chat-based language models are designed to be helpful, yet they should not comply with every user request. While most existing work primarily focuses on refusal of "unsafe" queries, we posit that the scope of noncompliance should be broadened. We introduce a comprehensive taxonomy of contextual noncompliance describing when and how models should not comply with user requests. Our taxonomy spans a wide range of categories including incomplete, unsupported, indeterminate, and humanizing requests (in addition to unsafe requests). To test noncompliance capabilities of language models, we use this taxonomy to develop a new evaluation suite of 1000 noncompliance prompts. We find that most existing models show significantly high compliance rates in certain previously understudied categories with models like GPT-4 incorrectly complying with as many as 30% of requests. To address these gaps, we explore different training strategies using a synthetically-generated training set of requests and expected noncompliant responses. Our experiments demonstrate that while direct finetuning of instruction-tuned models can lead to both over-refusal and a decline in general capabilities, using parameter efficient methods like low rank adapters helps to strike a good balance between appropriate noncompliance and other capabilities.

The concept of persona, originally adopted in dialogue literature, has re-surged as a promising framework for tailoring large language models (LLMs) to specific context (e.g., personalized search, LLM-as-a-judge). However, the growing research on leveraging persona in LLMs is relatively disorganized and lacks a systematic taxonomy. To close the gap, we present a comprehensive survey to categorize the current state of the field. We identify two lines of research, namely (1) LLM Role-Playing, where personas are assigned to LLMs, and (2) LLM Personalization, where LLMs take care of user personas. Additionally, we introduce existing methods for LLM personality evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first survey for role-playing and personalization in LLMs under the unified view of persona. We continuously maintain a paper collection to foster future endeavors: https://github.com/MiuLab/PersonaLLM-Survey

Corner cases for driving automation systems can often be detected by the system itself and subsequently resolved by remote humans. There exists a wide variety of technical approaches on how remote humans can resolve such issues. Over multiple domains, no common taxonomy on those approaches has developed yet, though. As the scaling of automated driving systems continues to increase, a uniform taxonomy is desirable to improve communication within the scientific community, but also beyond to policymakers and the general public. In this paper, we provide a survey on recent terminologies and propose a taxonomy for remote human input systems, classifying the different approaches based on their complexity.

Recommender systems exploit interaction history to estimate user preference, having been heavily used in a wide range of industry applications. However, static recommendation models are difficult to answer two important questions well due to inherent shortcomings: (a) What exactly does a user like? (b) Why does a user like an item? The shortcomings are due to the way that static models learn user preference, i.e., without explicit instructions and active feedback from users. The recent rise of conversational recommender systems (CRSs) changes this situation fundamentally. In a CRS, users and the system can dynamically communicate through natural language interactions, which provide unprecedented opportunities to explicitly obtain the exact preference of users. Considerable efforts, spread across disparate settings and applications, have been put into developing CRSs. Existing models, technologies, and evaluation methods for CRSs are far from mature. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of the techniques used in current CRSs. We summarize the key challenges of developing CRSs in five directions: (1) Question-based user preference elicitation. (2) Multi-turn conversational recommendation strategies. (3) Dialogue understanding and generation. (4) Exploitation-exploration trade-offs. (5) Evaluation and user simulation. These research directions involve multiple research fields like information retrieval (IR), natural language processing (NLP), and human-computer interaction (HCI). Based on these research directions, we discuss some future challenges and opportunities. We provide a road map for researchers from multiple communities to get started in this area. We hope this survey can help to identify and address challenges in CRSs and inspire future research.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced many domains and applications but face high fine-tuning costs, inference latency, limited edge deployability, and reliability concerns. Small language models (SLMs), compact, efficient, and adaptable, offer complementary remedies. Recent work explores collaborative frameworks that fuse SLMs' specialization and efficiency with LLMs' generalization and reasoning to meet diverse objectives across tasks and deployment scenarios. Motivated by these developments, this paper presents a systematic survey of SLM-LLM collaboration organized by collaboration objectives. We propose a taxonomy with four goals: performance enhancement, cost-effectiveness, cloud-edge privacy, and trustworthiness. Within this framework, we review representative methods, summarize design paradigms, and outline open challenges and future directions toward efficient, secure, and scalable SLM-LLM collaboration.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating multiple responses to a single prompt, yet little effort has been expended to help end-users or system designers make use of this capability. In this paper, we explore how to present many LLM responses at once. We design five features, which include both pre-existing and novel methods for computing similarities and differences across textual documents, as well as how to render their outputs. We report on a controlled user study (n=24) and eight case studies evaluating these features and how they support users in different tasks. We find that the features support a wide variety of sensemaking tasks and even make tasks previously considered to be too difficult by our participants now tractable. Finally, we present design guidelines to inform future explorations of new LLM interfaces.

Characterizing a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge of a given question is challenging. As a result, prior work has primarily examined LLM behavior under knowledge conflicts, where the model's internal parametric memory contradicts information in the external context. However, this does not fully reflect how well the model knows the answer to the question. In this paper, we first introduce a taxonomy of five knowledge statuses based on the consistency and correctness of LLM knowledge modes. We then propose KScope, a hierarchical framework of statistical tests that progressively refines hypotheses about knowledge modes and characterizes LLM knowledge into one of these five statuses. We apply KScope to nine LLMs across four datasets and systematically establish: (1) Supporting context narrows knowledge gaps across models. (2) Context features related to difficulty, relevance, and familiarity drive successful knowledge updates. (3) LLMs exhibit similar feature preferences when partially correct or conflicted, but diverge sharply when consistently wrong. (4) Context summarization constrained by our feature analysis, together with enhanced credibility, further improves update effectiveness and generalizes across LLMs.

A key puzzle in search, ads, and recommendation is that the ranking model can only utilize a small portion of the vastly available user interaction data. As a result, increasing data volume, model size, or computation FLOPs will quickly suffer from diminishing returns. We examined this problem and found that one of the root causes may lie in the so-called ``item-centric'' formulation, which has an unbounded vocabulary and thus uncontrolled model complexity. To mitigate quality saturation, we introduce an alternative formulation named ``user-centric ranking'', which is based on a transposed view of the dyadic user-item interaction data. We show that this formulation has a promising scaling property, enabling us to train better-converged models on substantially larger data sets.

We present SymbioticRAG, a novel framework that fundamentally reimagines Retrieval-Augmented Generation~(RAG) systems by establishing a bidirectional learning relationship between humans and machines. Our approach addresses two critical challenges in current RAG systems: the inherently human-centered nature of relevance determination and users' progression from "unconscious incompetence" in query formulation. SymbioticRAG introduces a two-tier solution where Level 1 enables direct human curation of retrieved content through interactive source document exploration, while Level 2 aims to build personalized retrieval models based on captured user interactions. We implement Level 1 through three key components: (1)~a comprehensive document processing pipeline with specialized models for layout detection, OCR, and extraction of tables, formulas, and figures; (2)~an extensible retriever module supporting multiple retrieval strategies; and (3)~an interactive interface that facilitates both user engagement and interaction data logging. We experiment Level 2 implementation via a retriever strategy incorporated LLM summarized user intention from user interaction logs. To maintain high-quality data preparation, we develop a human-on-the-loop validation interface that improves pipeline output while advancing research in specialized extraction tasks. Evaluation across three scenarios (literature review, geological exploration, and education) demonstrates significant improvements in retrieval relevance and user satisfaction compared to traditional RAG approaches. To facilitate broader research and further advancement of SymbioticRAG Level 2 implementation, we will make our system openly accessible to the research community.

Data agents are an emerging paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) and tool-using agents to automate data management, preparation, and analysis tasks. However, the term "data agent" is currently used inconsistently, conflating simple query responsive assistants with aspirational fully autonomous "data scientists". This ambiguity blurs capability boundaries and accountability, making it difficult for users, system builders, and regulators to reason about what a "data agent" can and cannot do. In this tutorial, we propose the first hierarchical taxonomy of data agents from Level 0 (L0, no autonomy) to Level 5 (L5, full autonomy). Building on this taxonomy, we will introduce a lifecycleand level-driven view of data agents. We will (1) present the L0-L5 taxonomy and the key evolutionary leaps that separate simple assistants from truly autonomous data agents, (2) review representative L0-L2 systems across data management, preparation, and analysis, (3) highlight emerging Proto-L3 systems that strive to autonomously orchestrate end-to-end data workflows to tackle diverse and comprehensive data-related tasks under supervision, and (4) discuss forward-looking research challenges towards proactive (L4) and generative (L5) data agents. We aim to offer both a practical map of today's systems and a research roadmap for the next decade of data-agent development.

Recommender systems have traditionally followed modular architectures comprising candidate generation, multi-stage ranking, and re-ranking, each trained separately with supervised objectives and hand-engineered features. While effective in many domains, such systems face persistent challenges including sparse and noisy interaction data, cold-start problems, limited personalization depth, and inadequate semantic understanding of user and item content. The recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a new paradigm for addressing these limitations through unified, language-native mechanisms that can generalize across tasks, domains, and modalities. In this paper, we present a comprehensive technical survey of how LLMs can be leveraged to tackle key challenges in modern recommender systems. We examine the use of LLMs for prompt-driven candidate retrieval, language-native ranking, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and conversational recommendation, illustrating how these approaches enhance personalization, semantic alignment, and interpretability without requiring extensive task-specific supervision. LLMs further enable zero- and few-shot reasoning, allowing systems to operate effectively in cold-start and long-tail scenarios by leveraging external knowledge and contextual cues. We categorize these emerging LLM-driven architectures and analyze their effectiveness in mitigating core bottlenecks of conventional pipelines. In doing so, we provide a structured framework for understanding the design space of LLM-enhanced recommenders, and outline the trade-offs between accuracy, scalability, and real-time performance. Our goal is to demonstrate that LLMs are not merely auxiliary components but foundational enablers for building more adaptive, semantically rich, and user-centric recommender systems

Social recommender systems (SocialRS) simultaneously leverage user-to-item interactions as well as user-to-user social relations for the task of generating item recommendations to users. Additionally exploiting social relations is clearly effective in understanding users' tastes due to the effects of homophily and social influence. For this reason, SocialRS has increasingly attracted attention. In particular, with the advance of Graph Neural Networks (GNN), many GNN-based SocialRS methods have been developed recently. Therefore, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic review of the literature on GNN-based SocialRS. In this survey, we first identify 80 papers on GNN-based SocialRS after annotating 2151 papers by following the PRISMA framework (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis). Then, we comprehensively review them in terms of their inputs and architectures to propose a novel taxonomy: (1) input taxonomy includes 5 groups of input type notations and 7 groups of input representation notations; (2) architecture taxonomy includes 8 groups of GNN encoder, 2 groups of decoder, and 12 groups of loss function notations. We classify the GNN-based SocialRS methods into several categories as per the taxonomy and describe their details. Furthermore, we summarize the benchmark datasets and metrics widely used to evaluate the GNN-based SocialRS methods. Finally, we conclude this survey by presenting some future research directions.

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) aim to recommend suitable items to users through natural language conversation. However, most CRS approaches do not effectively utilize the signal provided by these conversations. They rely heavily on explicit external knowledge e.g., knowledge graphs to augment the models' understanding of the items and attributes, which is quite hard to scale. To alleviate this, we propose an alternative information retrieval (IR)-styled approach to the CRS item recommendation task, where we represent conversations as queries and items as documents to be retrieved. We expand the document representation used for retrieval with conversations from the training set. With a simple BM25-based retriever, we show that our task formulation compares favorably with much more complex baselines using complex external knowledge on a popular CRS benchmark. We demonstrate further improvements using user-centric modeling and data augmentation to counter the cold start problem for CRSs.

Open Vocabulary Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection aims to detect interactions between humans and objects while generalizing to novel interaction classes beyond the training set. Current methods often rely on Vision and Language Models (VLMs) but face challenges due to suboptimal image encoders, as image-level pre-training does not align well with the fine-grained region-level interaction detection required for HOI. Additionally, effectively encoding textual descriptions of visual appearances remains difficult, limiting the model's ability to capture detailed HOI relationships. To address these issues, we propose INteraction-aware Prompting with Concept Calibration (INP-CC), an end-to-end open-vocabulary HOI detector that integrates interaction-aware prompts and concept calibration. Specifically, we propose an interaction-aware prompt generator that dynamically generates a compact set of prompts based on the input scene, enabling selective sharing among similar interactions. This approach directs the model's attention to key interaction patterns rather than generic image-level semantics, enhancing HOI detection. Furthermore, we refine HOI concept representations through language model-guided calibration, which helps distinguish diverse HOI concepts by investigating visual similarities across categories. A negative sampling strategy is also employed to improve inter-modal similarity modeling, enabling the model to better differentiate visually similar but semantically distinct actions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that INP-CC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on the SWIG-HOI and HICO-DET datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/ltttpku/INP-CC.

With the increasing numbers of publicly available models, there are probably pretrained, online models for most tasks users require. However, current model search methods are rudimentary, essentially a text-based search in the documentation, thus users cannot find the relevant models. This paper presents ProbeLog, a method for retrieving classification models that can recognize a target concept, such as "Dog", without access to model metadata or training data. Differently from previous probing methods, ProbeLog computes a descriptor for each output dimension (logit) of each model, by observing its responses on a fixed set of inputs (probes). Our method supports both logit-based retrieval ("find more logits like this") and zero-shot, text-based retrieval ("find all logits corresponding to dogs"). As probing-based representations require multiple costly feedforward passes through the model, we develop a method, based on collaborative filtering, that reduces the cost of encoding repositories by 3x. We demonstrate that ProbeLog achieves high retrieval accuracy, both in real-world and fine-grained search tasks and is scalable to full-size repositories.

The Interactive Knowledge Assistant Track (iKAT) 2024 focuses on advancing conversational assistants, able to adapt their interaction and responses from personalized user knowledge. The track incorporates a Personal Textual Knowledge Base (PTKB) alongside Conversational AI tasks, such as passage ranking and response generation. Query Rewrite being an effective approach for resolving conversational context, we explore Large Language Models (LLMs), as query rewriters. Specifically, our submitted runs explore multi-aspect query generation using the MQ4CS framework, which we further enhance with Learned Sparse Retrieval via the SPLADE architecture, coupled with robust cross-encoder models. We also propose an alternative to the previous interleaving strategy, aggregating multiple aspects during the reranking phase. Our findings indicate that multi-aspect query generation is effective in enhancing performance when integrated with advanced retrieval and reranking models. Our results also lead the way for better personalization in Conversational Search, relying on LLMs to integrate personalization within query rewrite, and outperforming human rewrite performance.

As AI systems enter into a growing number of societal domains, these systems increasingly shape and are shaped by user preferences, opinions, and behaviors. However, the design of AI systems rarely accounts for how AI and users shape one another. In this position paper, we argue for the development of formal interaction models which mathematically specify how AI and users shape one another. Formal interaction models can be leveraged to (1) specify interactions for implementation, (2) monitor interactions through empirical analysis, (3) anticipate societal impacts via counterfactual analysis, and (4) control societal impacts via interventions. The design space of formal interaction models is vast, and model design requires careful consideration of factors such as style, granularity, mathematical complexity, and measurability. Using content recommender systems as a case study, we critically examine the nascent literature of formal interaction models with respect to these use-cases and design axes. More broadly, we call for the community to leverage formal interaction models when designing, evaluating, or auditing any AI system which interacts with users.

What will information entry look like in the next generation of digital products? Since the 1970s, user access to relevant information has relied on domain-specific architectures of information retrieval (IR). Over the past two decades, the advent of modern IR systems, including web search engines and personalized recommender systems, has greatly improved the efficiency of retrieving relevant information from vast data corpora. However, the core paradigm of these IR systems remains largely unchanged, relying on filtering a predefined set of candidate items. Since 2022, breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have begun transforming how information is accessed, establishing a new technical paradigm. In this position paper, we introduce Agentic Information Retrieval (Agentic IR), a novel IR paradigm shaped by the capabilities of LLM agents. Agentic IR expands the scope of accessible tasks and leverages a suite of new techniques to redefine information retrieval. We discuss three types of cutting-edge applications of agentic IR and the challenges faced. We propose that agentic IR holds promise for generating innovative applications, potentially becoming a central information entry point in future digital ecosystems.

Ontologies and taxonomies of research fields are critical for managing and organising scientific knowledge, as they facilitate efficient classification, dissemination and retrieval of information. However, the creation and maintenance of such ontologies are expensive and time-consuming tasks, usually requiring the coordinated effort of multiple domain experts. Consequently, ontologies in this space often exhibit uneven coverage across different disciplines, limited inter-domain connectivity, and infrequent updating cycles. In this study, we investigate the capability of several large language models to identify semantic relationships among research topics within three academic domains: biomedicine, physics, and engineering. The models were evaluated under three distinct conditions: zero-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and fine-tuning on existing ontologies. Additionally, we assessed the cross-domain transferability of fine-tuned models by measuring their performance when trained in one domain and subsequently applied to a different one. To support this analysis, we introduce PEM-Rel-8K, a novel dataset consisting of over 8,000 relationships extracted from the most widely adopted taxonomies in the three disciplines considered in this study: MeSH, PhySH, and IEEE. Our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning LLMs on PEM-Rel-8K yields excellent performance across all disciplines.

Deep research agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform multi-step reasoning, web exploration, and long-form report generation. However, most existing systems operate in an autonomous manner, assuming fully specified user intent and evaluating only final outputs. In practice, research goals are often underspecified and evolve during exploration, making sustained interaction essential for robust alignment. Despite its importance, interaction remains largely invisible to existing deep research benchmarks, which neither model dynamic user feedback nor quantify its costs. We introduce IDRBench, the first benchmark for systematically evaluating interactive deep research. IDRBench combines a modular multi-agent research framework with on-demand interaction, a scalable reference-grounded user simulator, and an interaction-aware evaluation suite that jointly measures interaction benefits (quality and alignment) and costs (turns and tokens). Experiments across seven state-of-the-art LLMs show that interaction consistently improves research quality and robustness, often outweighing differences in model capacity, while revealing substantial trade-offs in interaction efficiency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at tackling various natural language tasks. However, due to the significant costs involved in re-training or fine-tuning them, they remain largely static and difficult to personalize. Nevertheless, a variety of applications could benefit from generations that are tailored to users' preferences, goals, and knowledge. Among them is web search, where knowing what a user is trying to accomplish, what they care about, and what they know can lead to improved search experiences. In this work, we propose a novel and general approach that augments an LLM with relevant context from users' interaction histories with a search engine in order to personalize its outputs. Specifically, we construct an entity-centric knowledge store for each user based on their search and browsing activities on the web, which is then leveraged to provide contextually relevant LLM prompt augmentations. This knowledge store is light-weight, since it only produces user-specific aggregate projections of interests and knowledge onto public knowledge graphs, and leverages existing search log infrastructure, thereby mitigating the privacy, compliance, and scalability concerns associated with building deep user profiles for personalization. We then validate our approach on the task of contextual query suggestion, which requires understanding not only the user's current search context but also what they historically know and care about. Through a number of experiments based on human evaluation, we show that our approach is significantly better than several other LLM-powered baselines, generating query suggestions that are contextually more relevant, personalized, and useful.

Current approaches to lifelong personalization operationalize relevance through semantic proximity, causing them to miss essential user information from topically unrelated interactions. To address this gap, we introduce LUCid, a benchmark designed to measure situational user-centric relevance in personalization. The benchmark consists of 1,936 realistic queries paired with interaction histories from up to 500 sessions. Across multiple architectures, our experiments show significant performance collapse when relevant context must be surfaced from semantically distant history: retrieval recall drops to near zero on the hardest instances, and response alignment remains near 50% even for state-of-the-art models such as Gemini-3-Flash, GPT-5.4, and Claude Haiku. These results expose a fundamental mismatch between the notion of relevance encoded by current systems and the situational relevance required for personalization, with direct implications for robustness and safety when critical user attributes remain undetected. LUCid enables the systematic evaluation of whether current models can surface situationally-relevant user information from previous interactions, and serves as a step toward realigning personalization with user-centered relevance.

Information retrieval is a cornerstone of modern knowledge acquisition, enabling billions of queries each day across diverse domains. However, traditional keyword-based search engines are increasingly inadequate for handling complex, multi-step information needs. Our position is that Large Language Models (LLMs), endowed with reasoning and agentic capabilities, are ushering in a new paradigm termed Agentic Deep Research. These systems transcend conventional information search techniques by tightly integrating autonomous reasoning, iterative retrieval, and information synthesis into a dynamic feedback loop. We trace the evolution from static web search to interactive, agent-based systems that plan, explore, and learn. We also introduce a test-time scaling law to formalize the impact of computational depth on reasoning and search. Supported by benchmark results and the rise of open-source implementations, we demonstrate that Agentic Deep Research not only significantly outperforms existing approaches, but is also poised to become the dominant paradigm for future information seeking. All the related resources, including industry products, research papers, benchmark datasets, and open-source implementations, are collected for the community in https://github.com/DavidZWZ/Awesome-Deep-Research.

Knowledge Bases (KBs) find applications in many knowledge-intensive tasks and, most notably, in information retrieval. Wikidata is one of the largest public general-purpose KBs. Yet, its collaborative nature has led to a convoluted schema and taxonomy. The YAGO 4 KB cleaned up the taxonomy by incorporating the ontology of Schema.org, resulting in a cleaner structure amenable to automated reasoning. However, it also cut away large parts of the Wikidata taxonomy, which is essential for information retrieval. In this paper, we extend YAGO 4 with a large part of the Wikidata taxonomy - while respecting logical constraints and the distinction between classes and instances. This yields YAGO 4.5, a new, logically consistent version of YAGO that adds a rich layer of informative classes. An intrinsic and an extrinsic evaluation show the value of the new resource.

Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval (RIR) targets retrieval settings where relevance is mediated by latent inferential links between a query and supporting evidence, rather than semantic similarity. Motivated by the emergent reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent work integrates these capabilities into the IR field, spanning the entire pipeline from benchmarks to retrievers and rerankers. Despite this progress, the field lacks a systematic framework to organize current efforts and articulate a clear path forward. To provide a clear roadmap for this rapidly growing yet fragmented area, this survey (1) systematizes existing RIR benchmarks by knowledge domains and modalities, providing a detailed analysis of the current landscape; (2) introduces a structured taxonomy that categorizes methods based on where and how reasoning is integrated into the retrieval pipeline, alongside an analysis of their trade-offs and practical applications; and (3) summarizes challenges and future directions to guide research in this evolving field.

Ad hoc dataset search requires matching underspecified natural-language queries against sparse, heterogeneous metadata records, a task where typical lexical or dense retrieval alone falls short. We reposition dataset search as a software-architecture problem and propose a bounded, auditable reference architecture for agentic hybrid retrieval that combines BM25 lexical search with dense-embedding retrieval via reciprocal rank fusion (RRF), orchestrated by a large language model (LLM) agent that repeatedly plans queries, evaluates the sufficiency of results, and reranks candidates. To reduce the vocabulary mismatch between user intent and provider-authored metadata, we introduce an offline metadata augmentation step in which an LLM generates pseudo-queries for each dataset record, augmenting both retrieval indexes before query time. Two architectural styles are examined: a single ReAct agent and a multi-agent horizontal architecture with Feedback Control. Their quality-attribute tradeoffs are analyzed with respect to modifiability, observability, performance, and governance. An evaluation framework comprising seven system variants is defined to isolate the contribution of each architectural decision. The architecture is presented as an extensible reference design for the software architecture community, incorporating explicit governance tactics to bound and audit nondeterministic LLM components.

Conversational interfaces provide a flexible and easy way for users to seek information that may otherwise be difficult or inconvenient to obtain. However, existing interfaces generally fall into one of two categories: FAQs, where users must have a concrete question in order to retrieve a general answer, or dialogs, where users must follow a predefined path but may receive a personalized answer. In this paper, we introduce Conversational Tree Search (CTS) as a new task that bridges the gap between FAQ-style information retrieval and task-oriented dialog, allowing domain-experts to define dialog trees which can then be converted to an efficient dialog policy that learns only to ask the questions necessary to navigate a user to their goal. We collect a dataset for the travel reimbursement domain and demonstrate a baseline as well as a novel deep Reinforcement Learning architecture for this task. Our results show that the new architecture combines the positive aspects of both the FAQ and dialog system used in the baseline and achieves higher goal completion while skipping unnecessary questions.

Recommender models excel at providing domain-specific item recommendations by leveraging extensive user behavior data. Despite their ability to act as lightweight domain experts, they struggle to perform versatile tasks such as providing explanations and engaging in conversations. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) represent a significant step towards artificial general intelligence, showcasing remarkable capabilities in instruction comprehension, commonsense reasoning, and human interaction. However, LLMs lack the knowledge of domain-specific item catalogs and behavioral patterns, particularly in areas that diverge from general world knowledge, such as online e-commerce. Finetuning LLMs for each domain is neither economic nor efficient. In this paper, we bridge the gap between recommender models and LLMs, combining their respective strengths to create a versatile and interactive recommender system. We introduce an efficient framework called InteRecAgent, which employs LLMs as the brain and recommender models as tools. We first outline a minimal set of essential tools required to transform LLMs into InteRecAgent. We then propose an efficient workflow within InteRecAgent for task execution, incorporating key components such as a memory bus, dynamic demonstration-augmented task planning, and reflection. InteRecAgent enables traditional recommender systems, such as those ID-based matrix factorization models, to become interactive systems with a natural language interface through the integration of LLMs. Experimental results on several public datasets show that InteRecAgent achieves satisfying performance as a conversational recommender system, outperforming general-purpose LLMs.

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance human capabilities, assisting with digital tasks from sending emails to performing data analysis. The abilities of existing LLMs at such tasks are often hindered by the lack of high-quality agent data from the corresponding environments they interact with. We propose Learn-by-interact, a data-centric framework to adapt LLM agents to any given environments without human annotations. Learn-by-interact synthesizes trajectories of agent-environment interactions based on documentations, and constructs instructions by summarizing or abstracting the interaction histories, a process called backward construction. We assess the quality of our synthetic data by using them in both training-based scenarios and training-free in-context learning (ICL), where we craft innovative retrieval approaches optimized for agents. Extensive experiments on SWE-bench, WebArena, OSWorld and Spider2-V spanning across realistic coding, web, and desktop environments show the effectiveness of Learn-by-interact in various downstream agentic tasks -- baseline results are improved by up to 12.2\% for ICL with Claude-3.5 and 19.5\% for training with Codestral-22B. We further demonstrate the critical role of backward construction, which provides up to 14.0\% improvement for training. Our ablation studies demonstrate the efficiency provided by our synthesized data in ICL and the superiority of our retrieval pipeline over alternative approaches like conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We expect that Learn-by-interact will serve as a foundation for agent data synthesis as LLMs are increasingly deployed at real-world environments.

We introduce a dynamic benchmarking system for conversational agents that evaluates their performance through a single, simulated, and lengthy userleftrightarrowagent interaction. The interaction is a conversation between the user and agent, where multiple tasks are introduced and then undertaken concurrently. We context switch regularly to interleave the tasks, which constructs a realistic testing scenario in which we assess the Long-Term Memory, Continual Learning, and Information Integration capabilities of the agents. Results from both proprietary and open-source Large-Language Models show that LLMs in general perform well on single-task interactions, but they struggle on the same tasks when they are interleaved. Notably, short-context LLMs supplemented with an LTM system perform as well as or better than those with larger contexts. Our benchmark suggests that there are other challenges for LLMs responding to more natural interactions that contemporary benchmarks have heretofore not been able to capture.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing through strong semantic understanding and generation. However, their black-box nature limits structured and multi-hop reasoning. In contrast, Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) provide explicit relational structures enriched with textual context, yet often lack semantic depth. Recent research shows that combining LLMs and TAGs yields complementary benefits: enhancing TAG representation learning and improving the reasoning and interpretability of LLMs. This survey provides the first systematic review of LLM--TAG integration from an orchestration perspective. We introduce a novel taxonomy covering two fundamental directions: LLM for TAG, where LLMs enrich graph-based tasks, and TAG for LLM, where structured graphs improve LLM reasoning. We categorize orchestration strategies into sequential, parallel, and multi-module frameworks, and discuss advances in TAG-specific pretraining, prompting, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Beyond methodology, we summarize empirical insights, curate available datasets, and highlight diverse applications across recommendation systems, biomedical analysis, and knowledge-intensive question answering. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising research directions, aiming to guide future work at the intersection of language and graph learning.

Human-computer interaction has long imagined technology that understands us-from our preferences and habits, to the timing and purpose of our everyday actions. Yet current user models remain fragmented, narrowly tailored to specific apps, and incapable of the flexible reasoning required to fulfill these visions. This paper presents an architecture for a general user model (GUM) that learns about you by observing any interaction you have with your computer. The GUM takes as input any unstructured observation of a user (e.g., device screenshots) and constructs confidence-weighted propositions that capture that user knowledge and preferences. GUMs can infer that a user is preparing for a wedding they're attending from messages with a friend. Or recognize that a user is struggling with a collaborator's feedback on a draft by observing multiple stalled edits and a switch to reading related work. GUMs introduce an architecture that infers new propositions about a user from multimodal observations, retrieves related propositions for context, and continuously revises existing propositions. To illustrate the breadth of applications that GUMs enable, we demonstrate how they augment chat-based assistants with context, manage OS notifications to selectively surface important information, and enable interactive agents that adapt to preferences across apps. We also instantiate proactive assistants (GUMBOs) that discover and execute useful suggestions on a user's behalf using their GUM. In our evaluations, we find that GUMs make calibrated and accurate inferences about users, and that assistants built on GUMs proactively identify and perform actions that users wouldn't think to request explicitly. Altogether, GUMs introduce methods that leverage multimodal models to understand unstructured context, enabling long-standing visions of HCI and entirely new interactive systems that anticipate user needs.

With advancements in large audio-language models (LALMs), which enhance large language models (LLMs) with auditory capabilities, these models are expected to demonstrate universal proficiency across various auditory tasks. While numerous benchmarks have emerged to assess LALMs' performance, they remain fragmented and lack a structured taxonomy. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comprehensive survey and propose a systematic taxonomy for LALM evaluations, categorizing them into four dimensions based on their objectives: (1) General Auditory Awareness and Processing, (2) Knowledge and Reasoning, (3) Dialogue-oriented Ability, and (4) Fairness, Safety, and Trustworthiness. We provide detailed overviews within each category and highlight challenges in this field, offering insights into promising future directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey specifically focused on the evaluations of LALMs, providing clear guidelines for the community. We will release the collection of the surveyed papers and actively maintain it to support ongoing advancements in the field.

Graph self-supervised learning (SSL) is now a go-to method for pre-training graph foundation models (GFMs). There is a wide variety of knowledge patterns embedded in the graph data, such as node properties and clusters, which are crucial to learning generalized representations for GFMs. However, existing surveys of GFMs have several shortcomings: they lack comprehensiveness regarding the most recent progress, have unclear categorization of self-supervised methods, and take a limited architecture-based perspective that is restricted to only certain types of graph models. As the ultimate goal of GFMs is to learn generalized graph knowledge, we provide a comprehensive survey of self-supervised GFMs from a novel knowledge-based perspective. We propose a knowledge-based taxonomy, which categorizes self-supervised graph models by the specific graph knowledge utilized. Our taxonomy consists of microscopic (nodes, links, etc.), mesoscopic (context, clusters, etc.), and macroscopic knowledge (global structure, manifolds, etc.). It covers a total of 9 knowledge categories and more than 25 pretext tasks for pre-training GFMs, as well as various downstream task generalization strategies. Such a knowledge-based taxonomy allows us to re-examine graph models based on new architectures more clearly, such as graph language models, as well as provide more in-depth insights for constructing GFMs.

Recommender systems are essential components of many online platforms, yet traditional approaches still struggle with understanding complex user preferences and providing explainable recommendations. The emergence of Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents offers a promising approach by enabling natural language interactions and interpretable reasoning, potentially transforming research in recommender systems. This survey provides a systematic review of the emerging applications of LLM-powered agents in recommender systems. We identify and analyze three key paradigms in current research: (1) Recommender-oriented approaches, which leverage intelligent agents to enhance the fundamental recommendation mechanisms; (2) Interaction-oriented approaches, which facilitate dynamic user engagement through natural dialogue and interpretable suggestions; and (3) Simulation-oriented approaches, which employ multi-agent frameworks to model complex user-item interactions and system dynamics. Beyond paradigm categorization, we analyze the architectural foundations of LLM-powered recommendation agents, examining their essential components: profile construction, memory management, strategic planning, and action execution. Our investigation extends to a comprehensive analysis of benchmark datasets and evaluation frameworks in this domain. This systematic examination not only illuminates the current state of LLM-powered agent recommender systems but also charts critical challenges and promising research directions in this transformative field.

Large-language Models (LLMs) have been extremely successful at tasks like complex dialogue understanding, reasoning and coding due to their emergent abilities. These emergent abilities have been extended with multi-modality to include image, audio, and video capabilities. Recommender systems, on the other hand, have been critical for information seeking and item discovery needs. Recently, there have been attempts to apply LLMs for recommendations. One difficulty of current attempts is that the underlying LLM is usually not trained on the recommender system data, which largely contains user interaction signals and is often not publicly available. Another difficulty is user interaction signals often have a different pattern from natural language text, and it is currently unclear if the LLM training setup can learn more non-trivial knowledge from interaction signals compared with traditional recommender system methods. Finally, it is difficult to train multiple LLMs for different use-cases, and to retain the original language and reasoning abilities when learning from recommender system data. To address these three limitations, we propose an Item-Language Model (ILM), which is composed of an item encoder to produce text-aligned item representations that encode user interaction signals, and a frozen LLM that can understand those item representations with preserved pretrained knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments which demonstrate both the importance of the language-alignment and of user interaction knowledge in the item encoder.

With the rise of smart personal devices, service-oriented human-agent interactions have become increasingly prevalent. This trend highlights the need for personalized dialogue assistants that can understand user-specific traits to accurately interpret requirements and tailor responses to individual preferences. However, existing approaches often overlook the complexities of long-term interactions and fail to capture users' subjective characteristics. To address these gaps, we present PAL-Bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate the personalization capabilities of service-oriented assistants in long-term user-agent interactions. In the absence of available real-world data, we develop a multi-step LLM-based synthesis pipeline, which is further verified and refined by human annotators. This process yields PAL-Set, the first Chinese dataset comprising multi-session user logs and dialogue histories, which serves as the foundation for PAL-Bench. Furthermore, to improve personalized service-oriented interactions, we propose H^2Memory, a hierarchical and heterogeneous memory framework that incorporates retrieval-augmented generation to improve personalized response generation. Comprehensive experiments on both our PAL-Bench and an external dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed memory framework.

Growing interests have been attracted in Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS), which explore user preference through conversational interactions in order to make appropriate recommendation. However, there is still a lack of ability in existing CRS to (1) traverse multiple reasoning paths over background knowledge to introduce relevant items and attributes, and (2) arrange selected entities appropriately under current system intents to control response generation. To address these issues, we propose CR-Walker in this paper, a model that performs tree-structured reasoning on a knowledge graph, and generates informative dialog acts to guide language generation. The unique scheme of tree-structured reasoning views the traversed entity at each hop as part of dialog acts to facilitate language generation, which links how entities are selected and expressed. Automatic and human evaluations show that CR-Walker can arrive at more accurate recommendation, and generate more informative and engaging responses.

Agentic applications based on large language models increasingly rely on multi-step interaction loops involving planning, action execution, and environment feedback. While such systems are now deployed at scale, improving them post-deployment remains challenging. Agent trajectories are voluminous and non-deterministic, and reviewing each one, whether through human review or auxiliary LLMs, is slow and cost-prohibitive. We propose a lightweight, signal-based framework for triaging agentic interaction trajectories. Our approach computes cheap, broadly applicable signals from live interactions and attaches them as structured attributes for trajectory triage, identifying interactions likely to be informative without affecting online agent behavior. We organize signals into a coarse-grained taxonomy spanning interaction (misalignment, stagnation, disengagement, satisfaction), execution (failure, loop), and environment (exhaustion), designed for computation without model calls. In a controlled annotation study on τ-bench, a widely used benchmark for tool-augmented agent evaluation, we show that signal-based sampling achieves an 82\% informativeness rate compared to 74\% for heuristic filtering and 54\% for random sampling, with a 1.52x efficiency gain per informative trajectory. The advantage is robust across reward strata and task domains, confirming that signals provide genuine per-trajectory informativeness gains rather than merely oversampling obvious failures. These results show that lightweight signals can serve as practical sampling infrastructure for agentic systems, and suggest a path toward preference data construction and post-deployment optimization.

We introduce a technique for multi-document grounded multi-turn synthetic dialog generation that incorporates three main ideas. First, we control the overall dialog flow using taxonomy-driven user queries that are generated with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. Second, we support the generation of multi-document grounded dialogs by mimicking real-world use of retrievers to update the grounding documents after every user-turn in the dialog. Third, we apply LLM-as-a-Judge to filter out queries with incorrect answers. Human evaluation of the synthetic dialog data suggests that the data is diverse, coherent, and includes mostly correct answers. Both human and automatic evaluations of answerable queries indicate that models fine-tuned on synthetic dialogs consistently out-perform those fine-tuned on existing human generated training data across four publicly available multi-turn document grounded benchmark test sets.

The paper underscores the significance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in reshaping recommender systems, attributing their value to unique reasoning abilities absent in traditional recommenders. Unlike conventional systems lacking direct user interaction data, LLMs exhibit exceptional proficiency in recommending items, showcasing their adeptness in comprehending intricacies of language. This marks a fundamental paradigm shift in the realm of recommendations. Amidst the dynamic research landscape, researchers actively harness the language comprehension and generation capabilities of LLMs to redefine the foundations of recommendation tasks. The investigation thoroughly explores the inherent strengths of LLMs within recommendation frameworks, encompassing nuanced contextual comprehension, seamless transitions across diverse domains, adoption of unified approaches, holistic learning strategies leveraging shared data reservoirs, transparent decision-making, and iterative improvements. Despite their transformative potential, challenges persist, including sensitivity to input prompts, occasional misinterpretations, and unforeseen recommendations, necessitating continuous refinement and evolution in LLM-driven recommender systems.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) systems are being increasingly deployed across all parts of industry and research settings. Developers and end users interact with these systems through the use of prompting or prompt engineering. While prompting is a widespread and highly researched concept, there exists conflicting terminology and a poor ontological understanding of what constitutes a prompt due to the area's nascency. This paper establishes a structured understanding of prompts, by assembling a taxonomy of prompting techniques and analyzing their use. We present a comprehensive vocabulary of 33 vocabulary terms, a taxonomy of 58 text-only prompting techniques, and 40 techniques for other modalities. We further present a meta-analysis of the entire literature on natural language prefix-prompting.

We study efficient multi-vector retrieval for late interaction in any modality. Late interaction has emerged as a dominant paradigm for information retrieval in text, images, visual documents, and videos, but its computation and storage costs grow linearly with document length, making it costly for image-, video-, and audio-rich corpora. To address this limitation, we explore query-agnostic methods for compressing multi-vector document representations under a constant vector budget. We introduce four approaches for index compression: sequence resizing, memory tokens, hierarchical pooling, and a novel attention-guided clustering (AGC). AGC uses an attention-guided mechanism to identify the most semantically salient regions of a document as cluster centroids and to weight token aggregation. Evaluating these methods on retrieval tasks spanning text (BEIR), visual-document (ViDoRe), and video (MSR-VTT, MultiVENT 2.0), we show that attention-guided clustering consistently outperforms other parameterized compression methods (sequence resizing and memory tokens), provides greater flexibility in index size than non-parametric hierarchical clustering, and achieves competitive or improved performance compared to a full, uncompressed index. The source code is available at: github.com/hanxiangqin/omni-col-press.

We present LLM-KT, a flexible framework designed to enhance collaborative filtering (CF) models by seamlessly integrating LLM (Large Language Model)-generated features. Unlike existing methods that rely on passing LLM-generated features as direct inputs, our framework injects these features into an intermediate layer of any CF model, allowing the model to reconstruct and leverage the embeddings internally. This model-agnostic approach works with a wide range of CF models without requiring architectural changes, making it adaptable to various recommendation scenarios. Our framework is built for easy integration and modification, providing researchers and developers with a powerful tool for extending CF model capabilities through efficient knowledge transfer. We demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments on the MovieLens and Amazon datasets, where it consistently improves baseline CF models. Experimental studies showed that LLM-KT is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods in context-aware settings but can be applied to a broader range of CF models than current approaches.

Large language model (LLM) powered chatbots are primarily text-based today, and impose a large interactional cognitive load, especially for exploratory or sensemaking tasks such as planning a trip or learning about a new city. Because the interaction is textual, users have little scaffolding in the way of structure, informational "scent", or ability to specify high-level preferences or goals. We introduce ExploreLLM that allows users to structure thoughts, help explore different options, navigate through the choices and recommendations, and to more easily steer models to generate more personalized responses. We conduct a user study and show that users find it helpful to use ExploreLLM for exploratory or planning tasks, because it provides a useful schema-like structure to the task, and guides users in planning. The study also suggests that users can more easily personalize responses with high-level preferences with ExploreLLM. Together, ExploreLLM points to a future where users interact with LLMs beyond the form of chatbots, and instead designed to support complex user tasks with a tighter integration between natural language and graphical user interfaces.

Open-domain question answering (QA) is known to involve several underlying knowledge and reasoning challenges, but are models actually learning such knowledge when trained on benchmark tasks? To investigate this, we introduce several new challenge tasks that probe whether state-of-the-art QA models have general knowledge about word definitions and general taxonomic reasoning, both of which are fundamental to more complex forms of reasoning and are widespread in benchmark datasets. As an alternative to expensive crowd-sourcing, we introduce a methodology for automatically building datasets from various types of expert knowledge (e.g., knowledge graphs and lexical taxonomies), allowing for systematic control over the resulting probes and for a more comprehensive evaluation. We find automatically constructing probes to be vulnerable to annotation artifacts, which we carefully control for. Our evaluation confirms that transformer-based QA models are already predisposed to recognize certain types of structural lexical knowledge. However, it also reveals a more nuanced picture: their performance degrades substantially with even a slight increase in the number of hops in the underlying taxonomic hierarchy, or as more challenging distractor candidate answers are introduced. Further, even when these models succeed at the standard instance-level evaluation, they leave much room for improvement when assessed at the level of clusters of semantically connected probes (e.g., all Isa questions about a concept).

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed via public-facing interfaces to interact with millions of users, each with diverse preferences. Despite this, preference tuning of LLMs predominantly relies on reward models trained using binary judgments where annotators select the preferred choice out of pairs of model outputs. In this work, we argue that this reliance on binary choices does not capture the broader, aggregate preferences of the target user in real-world tasks. We propose a taxonomy that identifies two dimensions of subjectivity where different users disagree on the preferred output-namely, the Plurality of Responses to Prompts, where prompts allow for multiple correct answers, and the Indistinguishability of Responses, where candidate outputs are paraphrases of each other. We show that reward models correlate weakly with user preferences in these cases. As a first step to address this issue, we introduce a simple yet effective method that augments existing binary preference datasets with synthetic preference judgments to estimate potential user disagreement. Incorporating these via a margin term as a form of regularization during model training yields predictions that better align with the aggregate user preferences.

Building on the foundations of language modeling in natural language processing, Next Token Prediction (NTP) has evolved into a versatile training objective for machine learning tasks across various modalities, achieving considerable success. As Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced to unify understanding and generation tasks within the textual modality, recent research has shown that tasks from different modalities can also be effectively encapsulated within the NTP framework, transforming the multimodal information into tokens and predict the next one given the context. This survey introduces a comprehensive taxonomy that unifies both understanding and generation within multimodal learning through the lens of NTP. The proposed taxonomy covers five key aspects: Multimodal tokenization, MMNTP model architectures, unified task representation, datasets \& evaluation, and open challenges. This new taxonomy aims to aid researchers in their exploration of multimodal intelligence. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at https://github.com/LMM101/Awesome-Multimodal-Next-Token-Prediction

Prompts are the interface for eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Understanding their structure and components is critical for analyzing LLM behavior and optimizing performance. However, the field lacks a comprehensive framework for systematic prompt analysis and understanding. We introduce PromptPrism, a linguistically-inspired taxonomy that enables prompt analysis across three hierarchical levels: functional structure, semantic component, and syntactic pattern. We show the practical utility of PromptPrism by applying it to three applications: (1) a taxonomy-guided prompt refinement approach that automatically improves prompt quality and enhances model performance across a range of tasks; (2) a multi-dimensional dataset profiling method that extracts and aggregates structural, semantic, and syntactic characteristics from prompt datasets, enabling comprehensive analysis of prompt distributions and patterns; (3) a controlled experimental framework for prompt sensitivity analysis by quantifying the impact of semantic reordering and delimiter modifications on LLM performance. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of our taxonomy across these applications, demonstrating that PromptPrism provides a foundation for refining, profiling, and analyzing prompts.

We demonstrate that LLMs may learn indicators of document usefulness and modulate their updates accordingly. We introduce random strings ("tags") as indicators of usefulness in a synthetic fine-tuning dataset. Fine-tuning on this dataset leads to implicit meta-learning (IML): in further fine-tuning, the model updates to make more use of text that is tagged as useful. We perform a thorough empirical investigation of this phenomenon, finding (among other things) that (i) it occurs in both pretrained LLMs and those trained from scratch, as well as on a vision task, and (ii) larger models and smaller batch sizes tend to give more IML. We also use probing to examine how IML changes the way models store knowledge in their parameters. Finally, we reflect on what our results might imply about capabilities, risks, and controllability of future AI systems. Our code can be found at https://github.com/krasheninnikov/internalization.

We present RecoWorld, a blueprint for building simulated environments tailored to agentic recommender systems. Such environments give agents a proper training space where they can learn from errors without impacting real users. RecoWorld distinguishes itself with a dual-view architecture: a simulated user and an agentic recommender engage in multi-turn interactions aimed at maximizing user retention. The user simulator reviews recommended items, updates its mindset, and when sensing potential user disengagement, generates reflective instructions. The agentic recommender adapts its recommendations by incorporating these user instructions and reasoning traces, creating a dynamic feedback loop that actively engages users. This process leverages the exceptional reasoning capabilities of modern LLMs. We explore diverse content representations within the simulator, including text-based, multimodal, and semantic ID modeling, and discuss how multi-turn RL enables the recommender to refine its strategies through iterative interactions. RecoWorld also supports multi-agent simulations, allowing creators to simulate the responses of targeted user populations. It marks an important first step toward recommender systems where users and agents collaboratively shape personalized information streams. We envision new interaction paradigms where "user instructs, recommender responds," jointly optimizing user retention and engagement.

Scientific literature searches are often exploratory, whereby users are not yet familiar with a particular field or concept but are interested in learning more about it. However, existing systems for scientific literature search are typically tailored to keyword-based lookup searches, limiting the possibilities for exploration. We propose NLP-KG, a feature-rich system designed to support the exploration of research literature in unfamiliar natural language processing (NLP) fields. In addition to a semantic search, NLP-KG allows users to easily find survey papers that provide a quick introduction to a field of interest. Further, a Fields of Study hierarchy graph enables users to familiarize themselves with a field and its related areas. Finally, a chat interface allows users to ask questions about unfamiliar concepts or specific articles in NLP and obtain answers grounded in knowledge retrieved from scientific publications. Our system provides users with comprehensive exploration possibilities, supporting them in investigating the relationships between different fields, understanding unfamiliar concepts in NLP, and finding relevant research literature. Demo, video, and code are available at: https://github.com/NLP-Knowledge-Graph/NLP-KG-WebApp.

Agentic systems consisting of multiple LLM-driven agents coordinating through tools and structured interactions, are increasingly deployed for complex reasoning and problem-solving tasks. At the same time, emerging low-code and template-based agent development platforms (e.g., Dify) enable users to rapidly build and orchestrate agentic systems, which we refer to as platform-orchestrated agentic systems. However, these systems are also fragile and it remains unclear how to systematically identify their potential failure root cause. This paper presents a study of root cause identification of these platform-orchestrated agentic systems. To support this initiative, we construct a dataset AgentFail containing 307 failure logs from ten agentic systems, each with fine-grained annotations linking failures to their root causes. We additionally utilize counterfactual reasoning-based repair strategy to ensure the reliability of the annotation. Building on the dataset, we develop a taxonomy that characterizes failure root causes and analyze their distribution across different platforms and task domains. Furthermore, we introduce a benchmark that leverages LLMs for automatically identifying root causes, in which we also utilize the proposed taxonomy as guidance for LLMs. Results show that the taxonomy can largely improve the performance, thereby confirming its utility. Nevertheless, the accuracy of root cause identification reaches at most 33.6%, which indicates that this task still remains challenging. In light of these results, we also provide actionable guidelines for building such agentic systems. In summary, this paper provides a reliable dataset of failure root cause for platform-orchestrated agentic systems, corresponding taxonomy and benchmark, which serves as a foundation for advancing the development of more reliable agentic systems.

Recent sequential recommendation models rely increasingly on consecutive short-term user-item interaction sequences to model user interests. These approaches have, however, raised concerns about both short- and long-term interests. (1) {\it short-term}: interaction sequences may not result from a monolithic interest, but rather from several intertwined interests, even within a short period of time, resulting in their failures to model skip behaviors; (2) {\it long-term}: interaction sequences are primarily observed sparsely at discrete intervals, other than consecutively over the long run. This renders difficulty in inferring long-term interests, since only discrete interest representations can be derived, without taking into account interest dynamics across sequences. In this study, we address these concerns by learning (1) multi-scale representations of short-term interests; and (2) dynamics-aware representations of long-term interests. To this end, we present an Interest Dynamics modeling framework using generative Neural Processes, coined IDNP, to model user interests from a functional perspective. IDNP learns a global interest function family to define each user's long-term interest as a function instantiation, manifesting interest dynamics through function continuity. Specifically, IDNP first encodes each user's short-term interactions into multi-scale representations, which are then summarized as user context. By combining latent global interest with user context, IDNP then reconstructs long-term user interest functions and predicts interactions at upcoming query timestep. Moreover, IDNP can model such interest functions even when interaction sequences are limited and non-consecutive. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-arts on various evaluation metrics.

Information retrieval systems have traditionally optimized for topical relevance-the degree to which retrieved documents match a query. However, relevance only approximates a deeper goal: utility, namely, whether retrieved information helps accomplish a user's underlying task. The emergence of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) fundamentally changes this paradigm. Retrieved documents are no longer consumed directly by users but instead serve as evidence for large language models (LLMs) that produce answers. As a result, retrieval effectiveness must be evaluated by its contribution to generation quality rather than by relevance-based ranking metrics alone. This tutorial argues that retrieval objectives are evolving from relevance-centric optimization toward LLM-centric utility. We present a unified framework covering LLM-agnostic versus LLM-specific utility, context-independent versus context-dependent utility, and the connection with LLM information needs and agentic RAG. By synthesizing recent advances, the tutorial provides conceptual foundations and practical guidance for designing retrieval systems aligned with the requirements of LLM-based information access.

Conversational Recommender System (CRS), which aims to recommend high-quality items to users through interactive conversations, has gained great research interest recently. A CRS is usually composed of a recommendation module and a generation module. In the previous work, these two modules are loosely connected in the model training and are shallowly integrated during inference, where a simple switching or copy mechanism is adopted to incorporate recommended items into generated responses. Moreover, the current end-to-end neural models trained on small crowd-sourcing datasets (e.g., 10K dialogs in the ReDial dataset) tend to overfit and have poor chit-chat ability. In this work, we propose a novel unified framework that integrates recommendation into the dialog (RecInDial) generation by introducing a vocabulary pointer. To tackle the low-resource issue in CRS, we finetune the large-scale pretrained language models to generate fluent and diverse responses, and introduce a knowledge-aware bias learned from an entity-oriented knowledge graph to enhance the recommendation performance. Furthermore, we propose to evaluate the CRS models in an end-to-end manner, which can reflect the overall performance of the entire system rather than the performance of individual modules, compared to the separate evaluations of the two modules used in previous work. Experiments on the benchmark dataset ReDial show our RecInDial model significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art methods. More extensive analyses show the effectiveness of our model.

The output quality of large language models (LLMs) can be improved via "reasoning": generating segments of chain-of-thought (CoT) content to further condition the model prior to producing user-facing output. While these chains contain valuable information, they are verbose and lack explicit organization, making them tedious to review. Moreover, they lack opportunities for user feedback, such as to remove unwanted considerations, add desired ones, or clarify unclear assumptions. We introduce Interactive Reasoning, an interaction design that visualizes chain-of-thought outputs as a hierarchy of topics and enables user review and modification. We implement interactive reasoning in Hippo, a prototype for AI-assisted decision making in the face of uncertain trade-offs. In a user study with 16 participants, we find that interactive reasoning in Hippo allows users to quickly identify and interrupt erroneous generations, efficiently steer the model towards customized responses, and better understand both model reasoning and model outputs. Our work contributes to a new paradigm that incorporates user oversight into LLM reasoning processes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown prominent performance in various downstream tasks and prompt engineering plays a pivotal role in optimizing LLMs' performance. This paper, not only as an overview of current prompt engineering methods, but also aims to highlight the limitation of designing prompts based on an anthropomorphic assumption that expects LLMs to think like humans. From our review of 50 representative studies, we demonstrate that a goal-oriented prompt formulation, which guides LLMs to follow established human logical thinking, significantly improves the performance of LLMs. Furthermore, We introduce a novel taxonomy that categorizes goal-oriented prompting methods into five interconnected stages and we demonstrate the broad applicability of our framework. With four future directions proposed, we hope to further emphasize the power and potential of goal-oriented prompt engineering in all fields.

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of agentic AI systems that extend beyond the capabilities of standalone models. By empowering LLMs to perceive external environments, integrate multimodal information, and interact with various tools, these agentic systems exhibit greater autonomy and adaptability across complex tasks. This evolution brings new opportunities to recommender systems (RS): LLM-based Agentic RS (LLM-ARS) can offer more interactive, context-aware, and proactive recommendations, potentially reshaping the user experience and broadening the application scope of RS. Despite promising early results, fundamental challenges remain, including how to effectively incorporate external knowledge, balance autonomy with controllability, and evaluate performance in dynamic, multimodal settings. In this perspective paper, we first present a systematic analysis of LLM-ARS: (1) clarifying core concepts and architectures; (2) highlighting how agentic capabilities -- such as planning, memory, and multimodal reasoning -- can enhance recommendation quality; and (3) outlining key research questions in areas such as safety, efficiency, and lifelong personalization. We also discuss open problems and future directions, arguing that LLM-ARS will drive the next wave of RS innovation. Ultimately, we foresee a paradigm shift toward intelligent, autonomous, and collaborative recommendation experiences that more closely align with users' evolving needs and complex decision-making processes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and have recently gained significant attention in the domain of Recommendation Systems (RS). These models, trained on massive amounts of data using self-supervised learning, have demonstrated remarkable success in learning universal representations and have the potential to enhance various aspects of recommendation systems by some effective transfer techniques such as fine-tuning and prompt tuning, and so on. The crucial aspect of harnessing the power of language models in enhancing recommendation quality is the utilization of their high-quality representations of textual features and their extensive coverage of external knowledge to establish correlations between items and users. To provide a comprehensive understanding of the existing LLM-based recommendation systems, this survey presents a taxonomy that categorizes these models into two major paradigms, respectively Discriminative LLM for Recommendation (DLLM4Rec) and Generative LLM for Recommendation (GLLM4Rec), with the latter being systematically sorted out for the first time. Furthermore, we systematically review and analyze existing LLM-based recommendation systems within each paradigm, providing insights into their methodologies, techniques, and performance. Additionally, we identify key challenges and several valuable findings to provide researchers and practitioners with inspiration. We have also created a GitHub repository to index relevant papers on LLMs for recommendation, https://github.com/WLiK/LLM4Rec.

The performance of unified multimodal models for image generation and editing is fundamentally constrained by the quality and comprehensiveness of their training data. While existing datasets have covered basic tasks like style transfer and simple object manipulation, they often lack the systematic structure and challenging scenarios required for real-world applications. To address this bottleneck, we introduce OpenGPT-4o-Image, a large-scale dataset constructed using a novel methodology that combines hierarchical task taxonomy with automated data generation. Our taxonomy not only includes fundamental capabilities such as text rendering and style control but also introduces highly practical yet challenging categories like scientific imagery for chemistry illustrations and complex instruction editing requiring simultaneous execution of multiple operations. Through an automated pipeline leveraging structured resource pools and GPT-4o, we generate 80k high-quality instruction-image pairs with controlled diversity, covering 11 major domains and 51 subtasks. Extensive experiments show that fine-tuning leading models on our dataset achieves significant performance gains across multiple benchmarks, with improvements of up to 18\% on editing tasks (UniWorld-V1 on ImgEdit-Bench) and 13% on generation tasks (Harmon on GenEval). Our work demonstrates that systematic data construction is key to advancing multimodal AI capabilities.

Large Language Models (LLM)-based systems, i.e. interconnected elements that include an LLM as a central component (e.g., conversational agents), are typically monolithic static architectures that rely on a single LLM for all user queries. However, they often require different preprocessing strategies, levels of reasoning, or knowledge. Generalist LLMs (i.e. GPT-4), trained on very large multi-topic corpora, can perform well in a variety of tasks. However, they require significant financial, energy, and hardware resources that may not be justified for basic tasks. This implies potentially investing in unnecessary costs for a given query. To overcome this problem, a routing mechanism routes user queries to the most suitable components, such as smaller LLMs or experts in specific topics. This approach may improve response quality while minimising costs. Routing can be expanded to other components of the conversational agent architecture, such as the selection of optimal embedding strategies. This paper explores key considerations for integrating routing into LLM-based systems, focusing on resource management, cost definition, and strategy selection. Our main contributions include a formalisation of the problem, a novel taxonomy of existing approaches emphasising relevance and resource efficiency, and a comparative analysis of these strategies in relation to industry practices. Finally, we identify critical challenges and directions for future research.

The emergence of AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) marks a pivotal shift toward the Agentic Web, a new phase of the internet defined by autonomous, goal-driven interactions. In this paradigm, agents interact directly with one another to plan, coordinate, and execute complex tasks on behalf of users. This transition from human-driven to machine-to-machine interaction allows intent to be delegated, relieving users from routine digital operations and enabling a more interactive, automated web experience. In this paper, we present a structured framework for understanding and building the Agentic Web. We trace its evolution from the PC and Mobile Web eras and identify the core technological foundations that support this shift. Central to our framework is a conceptual model consisting of three key dimensions: intelligence, interaction, and economics. These dimensions collectively enable the capabilities of AI agents, such as retrieval, recommendation, planning, and collaboration. We analyze the architectural and infrastructural challenges involved in creating scalable agentic systems, including communication protocols, orchestration strategies, and emerging paradigms such as the Agent Attention Economy. We conclude by discussing the potential applications, societal risks, and governance issues posed by agentic systems, and outline research directions for developing open, secure, and intelligent ecosystems shaped by both human intent and autonomous agent behavior. A continuously updated collection of relevant studies for agentic web is available at: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/agentic-web.

Recommendation systems, which assist users in discovering their preferred items among numerous options, have served billions of users across various online platforms. Intuitively, users' interactions with items are highly driven by their unchanging inherent intents (e.g., always preferring high-quality items) and changing demand intents (e.g., wanting a T-shirt in summer but a down jacket in winter). However, both types of intents are implicitly expressed in recommendation scenario, posing challenges in leveraging them for accurate intent-aware recommendations. Fortunately, in search scenario, often found alongside recommendation on the same online platform, users express their demand intents explicitly through their query words. Intuitively, in both scenarios, a user shares the same inherent intent and the interactions may be influenced by the same demand intent. It is therefore feasible to utilize the interaction data from both scenarios to reinforce the dual intents for joint intent-aware modeling. But the joint modeling should deal with two problems: 1) accurately modeling users' implicit demand intents in recommendation; 2) modeling the relation between the dual intents and the interactive items. To address these problems, we propose a novel model named Unified Dual-Intents Translation for joint modeling of Search and Recommendation (UDITSR). To accurately simulate users' demand intents in recommendation, we utilize real queries from search data as supervision information to guide its generation. To explicitly model the relation among the triplet <inherent intent, demand intent, interactive item>, we propose a dual-intent translation propagation mechanism to learn the triplet in the same semantic space via embedding translations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UDITSR outperforms SOTA baselines both in search and recommendation tasks.

User experience (UX) is a part of human-computer interaction (HCI) research and focuses on increasing intuitiveness, transparency, simplicity, and trust for system users. Most of the UX research for machine learning (ML) or natural language processing (NLP) focuses on a data-driven methodology, i.e., it fails to focus on users' requirements, and engages domain users mainly for usability evaluation. Moreover, more typical UX methods tailor the systems towards user usability, unlike learning about the user needs first. The paper proposes a methodology for integrating generative UX research into developing domain NLP applications. Generative UX research employs domain users at the initial stages of prototype development, i.e., ideation and concept evaluation, and the last stage for evaluating the change in user value. In the case study, we report the full-cycle prototype development of a domain-specific semantic search for daily operations in the process industry. Our case study shows that involving domain experts increases their interest and trust in the final NLP application. Moreover, we show that synergetic UX+NLP research efficiently considers data- and user-driven opportunities and constraints, which can be crucial for NLP applications in narrow domains

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for automating survey paper generation wang2406autosurvey, liang2025surveyx, yan2025surveyforge,su2025benchmarking,wen2025interactivesurvey. Existing approaches typically extract content from a large collection of related papers and prompt LLMs to summarize them directly. However, such methods often overlook the structural relationships among papers, resulting in generated surveys that lack a coherent taxonomy and a deeper contextual understanding of research progress. To address these shortcomings, we propose SurveyG, an LLM-based agent framework that integrates hierarchical citation graph, where nodes denote research papers and edges capture both citation dependencies and semantic relatedness between their contents, thereby embedding structural and contextual knowledge into the survey generation process. The graph is organized into three layers: Foundation, Development, and Frontier, to capture the evolution of research from seminal works to incremental advances and emerging directions. By combining horizontal search within layers and vertical depth traversal across layers, the agent produces multi-level summaries, which are consolidated into a structured survey outline. A multi-agent validation stage then ensures consistency, coverage, and factual accuracy in generating the final survey. Experiments, including evaluations by human experts and LLM-as-a-judge, demonstrate that SurveyG outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks, producing surveys that are more comprehensive and better structured to the underlying knowledge taxonomy of a field.

Providing personalized recommendations in an environment where items exhibit ephemerality and temporal relevancy (e.g. in social media) presents a few unique challenges: (1) inductively understanding ephemeral appeal for items in a setting where new items are created frequently, (2) adapting to trends within engagement patterns where items may undergo temporal shifts in relevance, (3) accurately modeling user preferences over this item space where users may express multiple interests. In this work we introduce MiCRO, a generative statistical framework that models multi-interest user preferences and temporal multi-interest item representations. Our framework is specifically formulated to adapt to both new items and temporal patterns of engagement. MiCRO demonstrates strong empirical performance on candidate retrieval experiments performed on two large scale user-item datasets: (1) an open-source temporal dataset of (User, User) follow interactions and (2) a temporal dataset of (User, Tweet) favorite interactions which we will open-source as an additional contribution to the community.

While the recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have successfully enabled generative recommenders with natural language interactions, their recommendation behavior is limited, leaving other simpler yet crucial components such as metadata or attribute filtering underutilized in the system. We propose an LLM-based music recommendation system with tool calling to serve as a unified retrieval-reranking pipeline. Our system positions an LLM as an end-to-end recommendation system that interprets user intent, plans tool invocations, and orchestrates specialized components: boolean filters (SQL), sparse retrieval (BM25), dense retrieval (embedding similarity), and generative retrieval (semantic IDs). Through tool planning, the system predicts which types of tools to use, their execution order, and the arguments needed to find music matching user preferences, supporting diverse modalities while seamlessly integrating multiple database filtering methods. We demonstrate that this unified tool-calling framework achieves competitive performance across diverse recommendation scenarios by selectively employing appropriate retrieval methods based on user queries, envisioning a new paradigm for conversational music recommendation systems.

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has witnessed significant progress in recent years, with a notable focus on improving large language models' (LLM) performance through innovative prompting techniques. Among these, prompt engineering coupled with structures has emerged as a promising paradigm, with designs such as Chain-of-Thought, Tree of Thoughts, or Graph of Thoughts, in which the overall LLM reasoning is guided by a structure such as a graph. As illustrated with numerous examples, this paradigm significantly enhances the LLM's capability to solve numerous tasks, ranging from logical or mathematical reasoning to planning or creative writing. To facilitate the understanding of this growing field and pave the way for future developments, we devise a general blueprint for effective and efficient LLM reasoning schemes. For this, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the prompt execution pipeline, clarifying and clearly defining different concepts. We then build the first taxonomy of structure-enhanced LLM reasoning schemes. We focus on identifying fundamental classes of harnessed structures, and we analyze the representations of these structures, algorithms executed with these structures, and many others. We refer to these structures as reasoning topologies, because their representation becomes to a degree spatial, as they are contained within the LLM context. Our study compares existing prompting schemes using the proposed taxonomy, discussing how certain design choices lead to different patterns in performance and cost. We also outline theoretical underpinnings, relationships between prompting and others parts of the LLM ecosystem such as knowledge bases, and the associated research challenges. Our work will help to advance future prompt engineering techniques.

We present Spacerini, a modular framework for seamless building and deployment of interactive search applications, designed to facilitate the qualitative analysis of large scale research datasets. Spacerini integrates features from both the Pyserini toolkit and the Hugging Face ecosystem to ease the indexing text collections and deploy them as search engines for ad-hoc exploration and to make the retrieval of relevant data points quick and efficient. The user-friendly interface enables searching through massive datasets in a no-code fashion, making Spacerini broadly accessible to anyone looking to qualitatively audit their text collections. This is useful both to IR~researchers aiming to demonstrate the capabilities of their indexes in a simple and interactive way, and to NLP~researchers looking to better understand and audit the failure modes of large language models. The framework is open source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/castorini/hf-spacerini, and includes utilities to load, pre-process, index, and deploy local and web search applications. A portfolio of applications created with Spacerini for a multitude of use cases can be found by visiting https://hf.co/spacerini.

We propose the LLMs4OL approach, which utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) for Ontology Learning (OL). LLMs have shown significant advancements in natural language processing, demonstrating their ability to capture complex language patterns in different knowledge domains. Our LLMs4OL paradigm investigates the following hypothesis: Can LLMs effectively apply their language pattern capturing capability to OL, which involves automatically extracting and structuring knowledge from natural language text? To test this hypothesis, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation using the zero-shot prompting method. We evaluate nine different LLM model families for three main OL tasks: term typing, taxonomy discovery, and extraction of non-taxonomic relations. Additionally, the evaluations encompass diverse genres of ontological knowledge, including lexicosemantic knowledge in WordNet, geographical knowledge in GeoNames, and medical knowledge in UMLS.

Information-seeking (IS) agents have achieved strong performance across a range of wide and deep search tasks, yet their tool use remains largely restricted to API-level snippet retrieval and URL-based page fetching, limiting access to the richer information available through real browsing. While full browser interaction could unlock deeper capabilities, its fine-grained control and verbose page content returns introduce substantial complexity for ReAct-style function-calling agents. To bridge this gap, we propose Nested Browser-Use Learning (NestBrowse), which introduces a minimal and complete browser-action framework that decouples interaction control from page exploration through a nested structure. This design simplifies agentic reasoning while enabling effective deep-web information acquisition. Empirical results on challenging deep IS benchmarks demonstrate that NestBrowse offers clear benefits in practice. Further in-depth analyses underscore its efficiency and flexibility.

Scholarly writing presents a complex space that generally follows a methodical procedure to plan and produce both rationally sound and creative compositions. Recent works involving large language models (LLM) demonstrate considerable success in text generation and revision tasks; however, LLMs still struggle to provide structural and creative feedback on the document level that is crucial to academic writing. In this paper, we introduce a novel taxonomy that categorizes scholarly writing behaviors according to intention, writer actions, and the information types of the written data. We also provide ManuScript, an original dataset annotated with a simplified version of our taxonomy to show writer actions and the intentions behind them. Motivated by cognitive writing theory, our taxonomy for scientific papers includes three levels of categorization in order to trace the general writing flow and identify the distinct writer activities embedded within each higher-level process. ManuScript intends to provide a complete picture of the scholarly writing process by capturing the linearity and non-linearity of writing trajectory, such that writing assistants can provide stronger feedback and suggestions on an end-to-end level. The collected writing trajectories are viewed at https://minnesotanlp.github.io/REWARD_demo/

Social cues, which convey others' presence, behaviors, or identities, play a crucial role in human information seeking by helping individuals judge relevance and trustworthiness. However, existing LLM-based search systems primarily rely on semantic features, creating a misalignment with the socialized cognition underlying natural information seeking. To address this gap, we explore how the integration of social cues into LLM-based search influences users' perceptions, experiences, and behaviors. Focusing on social media platforms that are beginning to adopt LLM-based search, we integrate design workshops, the implementation of the prototype system (SoulSeek), a between-subjects study, and mixed-method analyses to examine both outcome- and process-level findings. The workshop informs the prototype's cue-integrated design. The study shows that social cues improve perceived outcomes and experiences, promote reflective information behaviors, and reveal limits of current LLM-based search. We propose design implications emphasizing better social-knowledge understanding, personalized cue settings, and controllable interactions.

Artificial Intelligence is moving from models that only generate text to Agentic AI, where systems behave as autonomous entities that can perceive, reason, plan, and act. Large Language Models (LLMs) are no longer used only as passive knowledge engines but as cognitive controllers that combine memory, tool use, and feedback from their environment to pursue extended goals. This shift already supports the automation of complex workflows in software engineering, scientific discovery, and web navigation, yet the variety of emerging designs, from simple single loop agents to hierarchical multi agent systems, makes the landscape hard to navigate. In this paper, we investigate architectures and propose a unified taxonomy that breaks agents into Perception, Brain, Planning, Action, Tool Use, and Collaboration. We use this lens to describe the move from linear reasoning procedures to native inference time reasoning models, and the transition from fixed API calls to open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Native Computer Use. We also group the environments in which these agents operate, including digital operating systems, embodied robotics, and other specialized domains, and we review current evaluation practices. Finally, we highlight open challenges, such as hallucination in action, infinite loops, and prompt injection, and outline future research directions toward more robust and reliable autonomous systems.

Language models excel at following instructions but often struggle with the collaborative aspects of conversation that humans naturally employ. This limitation in grounding -- the process by which conversation participants establish mutual understanding -- can lead to outcomes ranging from frustrated users to serious consequences in high-stakes scenarios. To systematically study grounding challenges in human-LLM interactions, we analyze logs from three human-assistant datasets: WildChat, MultiWOZ, and Bing Chat. We develop a taxonomy of grounding acts and build models to annotate and forecast grounding behavior. Our findings reveal significant differences in human-human and human-LLM grounding: LLMs were three times less likely to initiate clarification and sixteen times less likely to provide follow-up requests than humans. Additionally, early grounding failures predicted later interaction breakdowns. Building on these insights, we introduce RIFTS: a benchmark derived from publicly available LLM interaction data containing situations where LLMs fail to initiate grounding. We note that current frontier models perform poorly on RIFTS, highlighting the need to reconsider how we train and prompt LLMs for human interaction. To this end, we develop a preliminary intervention that mitigates grounding failures.

Recent surveys on data augmentation for natural language processing have reported different techniques and advancements in the field. Several frameworks, tools, and repositories promote the implementation of text data augmentation pipelines. However, a lack of evaluation criteria and standards for method comparison due to different tasks, metrics, datasets, architectures, and experimental settings makes comparisons meaningless. Also, a lack of methods unification exists and text data augmentation research would benefit from unified metrics to compare different augmentation methods. Thus, academics and the industry endeavor relevant evaluation metrics for text data augmentation techniques. The contribution of this work is to provide a taxonomy of evaluation metrics for text augmentation methods and serve as a direction for a unified benchmark. The proposed taxonomy organizes categories that include tools for implementation and metrics calculation. Finally, with this study, we intend to present opportunities to explore the unification and standardization of text data augmentation metrics.

Assessing the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in addressing diverse tasks is essential for comprehending their strengths and weaknesses. Conventional evaluation techniques typically apply a single prompting strategy uniformly across datasets, not considering the varying degrees of task complexity. We introduce the Hierarchical Prompting Taxonomy (HPT), a taxonomy that employs a Hierarchical Prompt Framework (HPF) composed of five unique prompting strategies, arranged from the simplest to the most complex, to assess LLMs more precisely and to offer a clearer perspective. This taxonomy assigns a score, called the Hierarchical Prompting Score (HP-Score), to datasets as well as LLMs based on the rules of the taxonomy, providing a nuanced understanding of their ability to solve diverse tasks and offering a universal measure of task complexity. Additionally, we introduce the Adaptive Hierarchical Prompt framework, which automates the selection of appropriate prompting strategies for each task. This study compares manual and adaptive hierarchical prompt frameworks using four instruction-tuned LLMs, namely Llama 3 8B, Phi 3 3.8B, Mistral 7B, and Gemma 7B, across four datasets: BoolQ, CommonSenseQA (CSQA), IWSLT-2017 en-fr (IWSLT), and SamSum. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of HPT, providing a reliable way to compare different tasks and LLM capabilities. This paper leads to the development of a universal evaluation metric that can be used to evaluate both the complexity of the datasets and the capabilities of LLMs. The implementation of both manual HPF and adaptive HPF is publicly available.