pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Efficient Fireworks Algorithm Equipped with an Explosion Mechanism based on Student's T-distribution
Authors: Cen Shipeng, Tan Ying
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model

Many real-world problems can be transformed into optimization problems, which can be classified into convex and non-convex. Although convex problems are almost completely studied in theory, many related algorithms to many non-convex problems do not work well and we need more optimization techniques. As a swarm intelligence optimization algorithm, the Fireworks Algorithm(FWA) has been widely studied and applied to many real-world scenarios, even including large language model fine-tuning. But the current fireworks algorithm still has a number of problems. Firstly, as a heuristic algorithm, its performance on convex problems cannot match the SOTA results, and can even be said to be unsatisfactory; secondly, the sampling methods (explosion) of most FWA variants are still uniform sampling, which is actually inefficient in high dimensional cases. This work of ours proposes a new student's t-distribution based FWA(TFWA) with a solid theoretical foundation, which fully utilizes the advantage that student's t-distribution can adjust the parameters (degrees of freedom) and thus adjust the exploitation capability. We have fully experimented on mainstream benchmarks CEC2013 and CEC2017, which proves that TFWA not only becomes the strongest variant of the fireworks algorithm, but also achieves results comparable to SOTA on the test set, and its performance is far superior to that of the SOTA algorithm in some scenarios with a large number of extreme points.
No Stupid Questions: An Analysis of Question Query Generation for Citation Recommendation
Authors: Brian D. Zimmerman, Julien Aubert-Béduchaud, Florian Boudin, Akiko Aizawa, Olga Vechtomova
Date: 2025-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Citation Recommendation

Existing techniques for citation recommendation are constrained by their adherence to article contents and metadata. We leverage GPT-4o-mini's latent expertise as an inquisitive assistant by instructing it to ask questions which, when answered, could expose new insights about an excerpt from a scientific article. We evaluate the utility of these questions as retrieval queries, measuring their effectiveness in retrieving and ranking masked target documents. In some cases, generated questions ended up being better queries than extractive keyword queries generated by the same model. We additionally propose MMR-RBO, a variation of Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) using Rank-Biased Overlap (RBO) to identify which questions will perform competitively with the keyword baseline. As all question queries yield unique result sets, we contend that there are no stupid questions.
Serendipitous Recommendation with Multimodal LLM
Authors: HaoTing Wang, Jianling Wang, Hao Li, Fangjun Yi, Mengyu Fu, Youwei Zhang, Yifan Liu, Liang Liu, Minmin Chen, Ed H. Chi, Lichan Hong, Haokai Lu
Date: 2025-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, World Knowledge

Conventional recommendation systems succeed in identifying relevant content but often fail to provide users with surprising or novel items. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) possess the world knowledge and multimodal understanding needed for serendipity, but their integration into billion-item-scale platforms presents significant challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical framework where fine-tuned MLLMs provide high-level guidance to conventional recommendation models, steering them towards more serendipitous suggestions. This approach leverages MLLM strengths in understanding multimodal content and user interests while retaining the efficiency of traditional models for item-level recommendation. This mitigates the complexity of applying MLLMs directly to vast action spaces. We also demonstrate a chain-of-thought strategy enabling MLLMs to discover novel user interests by first understanding video content and then identifying relevant yet unexplored interest clusters. Through live experiments within a commercial short-form video platform serving billions of users, we show that our MLLM-powered approach significantly improves both recommendation serendipity and user satisfaction.
Rule-Assisted Attribute Embedding
Authors: Sibo Zhao, Michael Bewong, Selasi Kwashie, Junwei Hu, Zaiwen Feng
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems often overlook the rich attribute information embedded in property graphs, limiting their effectiveness. Existing graph convolutional network (GCN) models either ignore attributes or rely on simplistic <user, item, attribute> triples, failing to capture deeper semantic structures. We propose RAE (Rule- Assisted Approach for Attribute Embedding), a novel method that improves recommendations by mining semantic rules from property graphs to guide attribute embedding. RAE performs rule-based random walks to generate enriched attribute representations, which are integrated into GCNs. Experiments on real-world datasets (BlogCatalog, Flickr) show that RAE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 10.6% on average in Recall@20 and NDCG@20. RAE also demonstrates greater robustness to sparse data and missing attributes, highlighting the value of leveraging structured attribute information in recommendation tasks.
Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Reasoning towards Multi-Step Multi-Source Search in Large Language Models
Authors: Wentao Shi, Yiqing Shen
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) can face factual limitations when responding to time-sensitive queries about recent events that arise after their knowledge thresholds in the training corpus. Existing search-augmented approaches fall into two categories, each with distinct limitations: multi-agent search frameworks incur substantial computational overhead by separating search planning and response synthesis across multiple LLMs, while single-LLM tool-calling methods restrict themselves to sequential planned, single-query searches from sole search sources. We present Reasoning-Search (R-Search), a single-LLM search framework that unifies multi-step planning, multi-source search execution, and answer synthesis within one coherent inference process. Innovatively, it structure the output into four explicitly defined components, including reasoning steps that guide the search process (<think>), a natural-language directed acyclic graph that represents the search plans with respect to diverse sources (<search>), retrieved results from executing the search plans (<result>), and synthesized final answers (<answer>). To enable effective generation of these structured outputs, we propose a specialized Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (ReFT) method based on GRPO, together with a multi-component reward function that optimizes LLM's answer correctness, structural validity of the generated DAG, and adherence to the defined output format. Experimental evaluation on FinSearchBench-24, SearchExpertBench-25, and seven Q and A benchmarks demonstrates that R-Search outperforms state-of-the-art methods, while achieving substantial efficiency gains through 70% reduction in context token usage and approximately 50% decrease in execution latency. Code is available at https://github.com/wentao0429/Reasoning-search.
NAM: A Normalization Attention Model for Personalized Product Search In Fliggy
Authors: Shui Liu, Mingyuan Tao, Maofei Que, Pan Li, Dong Li, Shenghua Ni, Zhuoran Zhuang
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00

Personalized product search provides significant benefits to e-commerce platforms by extracting more accurate user preferences from historical behaviors. Previous studies largely focused on the user factors when personalizing the search query, while ignoring the item perspective, which leads to the following two challenges that we summarize in this paper: First, previous approaches relying only on co-occurrence frequency tend to overestimate the conversion rates for popular items and underestimate those for long-tail items, resulting in inaccurate item similarities; Second, user purchasing propensity is highly heterogeneous according to the popularity of the target item: it is less correlated with the user's historical behavior for a popular item and more correlated for a long-tail item. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose NAM, a Normalization Attention Model, which optimizes ''when to personalize'' by utilizing Inverse Item Frequency (IIF) and employing a gating mechanism, as well as optimizes ''how to personalize'' by normalizing the attention mechanism from a global perspective. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed NAM model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models. Furthermore, we conducted an online A/B test at Fliggy, and obtained a significant improvement of 0.8% over the latest production system in conversion rate.
MERIT: A Merchant Incentive Ranking Model for Hotel Search & Ranking
Authors: Shigang Quan, Hailong Tan, Shui Liu, Zhenzhe Zheng, Ruihao Zhu, Liangyue Li, Quan Lu, Fan Wu
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation

Online Travel Platforms (OTPs) have been working on improving their hotel Search & Ranking (S&R) systems that facilitate efficient matching between consumers and hotels. Existing OTPs focus almost exclusively on improving platform revenue. In this work, we take a first step in incorporating hotel merchants' objectives into the design of hotel S&R systems to achieve an incentive loop: the OTP tilts impressions and better-ranked positions to merchants with high quality, and in return, the merchants provide better service to consumers. Three critical design challenges need to be resolved to achieve this incentive loop: Matthew Effect in the consumer feedback-loop, unclear relation between hotel quality and performance, and conflicts between short-term and long-term revenue. To address these challenges, we propose MERIT, a MERchant IncenTive ranking model, which can simultaneously take the interests of merchants and consumers into account. We define a new Merchant Competitiveness Index (MCI) to represent hotel merchant quality and propose a new Merchant Tower to model the relation between MCI and ranking scores. Also, we design a monotonic structure for Merchant Tower to provide a clear relation between hotel quality and performance. Finally, we propose a Multi-objective Stratified Pairwise Loss, which can mitigate the conflicts between OTP's short-term and long-term revenue. The offline experiment results indicate that MERIT outperforms these methods in optimizing the demands of consumers and merchants. Furthermore, we conduct an online A/B test and obtain an improvement of 3.02% for the MCI score.
TSRec: Enhancing Repeat-Aware Recommendation from a Temporal-Sequential Perspective
Authors: Shigang Quan, Shui Liu, Zhenzhe Zheng, Fan Wu
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00

Repeat consumption, such as repurchasing items and relistening songs, is a common scenario in daily life. To model repeat consumption, the repeat-aware recommendation has been proposed to predict which item will be re-interacted based on the user-item interactions. In this paper, we investigate various inherent characteristics to enhance the repeat-aware recommendation. Specifically, we explore these characteristics from two aspects: one is from the temporal aspect where we consider the time interval relationship in the user behavior sequence; the other is from the sequential aspect where we consider the sequential-level relationship in the user behavior sequence. And our intuition is that both the temporal pattern and sequential pattern will reflect users' intentions of repeat consumption. By utilizing these two patterns, a novel model called Temporal and Sequential repeat-aware Recommendation(TSRec for short) is proposed to enhance repeat-aware recommendation. TSRec has three main components: 1) User-specific Temporal Representation Module (UTRM), which encodes and extracts user historical repeat temporal information. 2)Item-specific Temporal Representation Module (ITRM), which incorporates item time interval information as side information to alleviate the data sparsity problem of user repeat behavior sequence. 3) Sequential Repeat-Aware Module (SRAM), which represents the similarity between the user's current and the last repeat sequences. Extensive experimental results on three public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of TSRec over state-of-the-art methods. The implementation code is available https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TSRec-2306/.
Leveraging LLMs to Evaluate Usefulness of Document
Authors: Xingzhu Wang, Erhan Zhang, Yiqun Chen, Jinghan Xuan, Yucheng Hou, Yitong Xu, Ying Nie, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Jiaxin Mao
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00

The conventional Cranfield paradigm struggles to effectively capture user satisfaction due to its weak correlation between relevance and satisfaction, alongside the high costs of relevance annotation in building test collections. To tackle these issues, our research explores the potential of leveraging large language models (LLMs) to generate multilevel usefulness labels for evaluation. We introduce a new user-centric evaluation framework that integrates users' search context and behavioral data into LLMs. This framework uses a cascading judgment structure designed for multilevel usefulness assessments, drawing inspiration from ordinal regression techniques. Our study demonstrates that when well-guided with context and behavioral information, LLMs can accurately evaluate usefulness, allowing our approach to surpass third-party labeling methods. Furthermore, we conduct ablation studies to investigate the influence of key components within the framework. We also apply the labels produced by our method to predict user satisfaction, with real-world experiments indicating that these labels substantially improve the performance of satisfaction prediction models.
Video-ColBERT: Contextualized Late Interaction for Text-to-Video Retrieval
Authors: Arun Reddy, Alexander Martin, Eugene Yang, Andrew Yates, Kate Sanders, Kenton Murray, Reno Kriz, Celso M. de Melo, Benjamin Van Durme, Rama Chellappa
Date: 2025-03-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Retrieval, Text to Video Retrieval, Video Retrieval

In this work, we tackle the problem of text-to-video retrieval (T2VR). Inspired by the success of late interaction techniques in text-document, text-image, and text-video retrieval, our approach, Video-ColBERT, introduces a simple and efficient mechanism for fine-grained similarity assessment between queries and videos. Video-ColBERT is built upon 3 main components: a fine-grained spatial and temporal token-wise interaction, query and visual expansions, and a dual sigmoid loss during training. We find that this interaction and training paradigm leads to strong individual, yet compatible, representations for encoding video content. These representations lead to increases in performance on common text-to-video retrieval benchmarks compared to other bi-encoder methods.
EviNet: Evidential Reasoning Network for Resilient Graph Learning in the Open and Noisy Environments
Authors: Weijie Guan, Haohui Wang, Jian Kang, Lihui Liu, Dawei Zhou
Date: 2025-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Logical Reasoning, Out-of-Distribution Detection

Graph learning has been crucial to many real-world tasks, but they are often studied with a closed-world assumption, with all possible labels of data known a priori. To enable effective graph learning in an open and noisy environment, it is critical to inform the model users when the model makes a wrong prediction to in-distribution data of a known class, i.e., misclassification detection or when the model encounters out-of-distribution from novel classes, i.e., out-of-distribution detection. This paper introduces Evidential Reasoning Network (EVINET), a framework that addresses these two challenges by integrating Beta embedding within a subjective logic framework. EVINET includes two key modules: Dissonance Reasoning for misclassification detection and Vacuity Reasoning for out-of-distribution detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVINET outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple metrics in the tasks of in-distribution classification, misclassification detection, and out-of-distribution detection. EVINET demonstrates the necessity of uncertainty estimation and logical reasoning for misclassification detection and out-of-distribution detection and paves the way for open-world graph learning. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/SSSKJ/EviNET.
Online Learning Control Strategies for Industrial Processes with Application for Loosening and Conditioning
Authors: Yue Wu, Jianfu Cao, Ye Cao
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

This paper proposes a novel adaptive Koopman Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework, termed HPC-AK-MPC, designed to address the dual challenges of time-varying dynamics and safe operation in complex industrial processes. The framework integrates two core strategies: online learning and historically-informed safety constraints. To contend with process time-variance, a Recursive Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition (rEDMDc) technique is employed to construct an adaptive Koopman model capable of updating its parameters from real-time data, endowing the controller with the ability to continuously learn and track dynamic changes. To tackle the critical issue of safe operation under model uncertainty, we introduce a novel Historical Process Constraint (HPC) mechanism. This mechanism mines successful operational experiences from a historical database and, by coupling them with the confidence level of the online model, generates a dynamic "safety corridor" for the MPC optimization problem. This approach transforms implicit expert knowledge into explicit, adaptive constraints, establishing a dynamic balance between pursuing optimal performance and ensuring robust safety. The proposed HPC-AK-MPC method is applied to a real-world tobacco loosening and conditioning process and systematically validated using an "advisor mode" simulation framework with industrial data. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to historical operations, the proposed method significantly improves the Process Capability Index (Cpk) for key quality variables across all tested batches, proving its substantial potential in enhancing control performance while guaranteeing operational safety.
Identifying Hubs Through Influential Nodes in Transportation Network by Using a Gravity Centrality Approach
Authors: Worawit Tepsan, Aniwat Phaphuangwittayakul, Saronsad Sokantika, Napat Harnpornchai
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: Algorithms 2025 6
Tasks: Community Detection

Hubs are strategic locations that function as central nodes within clusters of cities, playing a pivotal role in the distribution of goods, services, and connectivity. Identifying these vital hubs—through analyzing influential locations within transportation networks—is essential for effective urban planning, logistics optimization, and enhancing infrastructure resilience. This task becomes even more crucial in developing and less-developed countries, where such hubs can significantly accelerate urban growth and drive economic development. However, existing hub identification approaches face notable limitations. Traditional centrality measures often yield low variance in node scores, making it difficult to distinguish truly influential nodes. Moreover, these methods typically rely solely on either local metrics or global network structures, limiting their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method called Hybrid Community-based Gravity Centrality (HCGC), which integrates local influence measures, community detection, and gravity-based modeling to more effectively identify influential nodes in complex networks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that HCGC consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of spreading ability across varying truncation radii. To further validate our approach, we introduce ThaiNet, a newly constructed real-world transportation network dataset. The results show that HCGC not only preserves the strengths of traditional local approaches but also captures broader structural patterns, making it a powerful and practical tool for real-world network analysis.
Industrial Flexibility Investment Under Uncertainty: A Multi-Stage Stochastic Framework Considering Energy and Reserve Market Participation
Authors: Amund Norland, Lasse Skare, Ole Jakob Viken, Stian Backe
Date: 2025-06-10 00:00:00

The global energy transition toward net-zero emissions by 2050 is expected to increase the share of variable renewable energy sources (VRES) in the energy mix. As a result, industrial actors will encounter more complex market conditions, characterized by volatile electricity prices, rising carbon costs, and stricter regulations. This situation calls for the industry to capitalize on opportunities in both spot-price arbitrage and reserve market participation, while also meeting future regulatory demands. This paper presents a multi-stage optimization framework that supports investment decisions in flexible assets and enables reserve market participation by delivering ancillary services. The framework incorporates investment decisions, spot- and reserve-market bidding, and real-time operation. Uncertainty in market prices and operational conditions is handled through a nodal formulation. A case study of a large industrial site in Norway is performed, comparing the investment decisions with future technology- and carbon pricing scenarios under varying market conditions.
AN INTERNSHIP REPORT ON E-HELPING HOUSING SOCIETY PROJECT REPORT
Authors: Kamal Acharya
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ResearchGate 2025 6
Tasks: All, Management

The basic concept of this society system, we create global web based application in asp.net with C# language to manage Society with House and Owner of house detail. We provide platform to register society to our system, and there are many houses according to each society. Each house allocated to owner of house, all the owner are members of our project. After becoming a member they can login to give his house on rent or sell for all users. The people can easily find search the rent house or sell house in which society and get contact detail of owner of house by visiting our website. All members can make online complain related home to society management.