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Recommendation systems aim to provide users with relevant suggestions, but often lack interpretability and fail to capture higher-level semantic relationships between user behaviors and profiles. We propose a novel approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to construct personalized reasoning graphs. These graphs link a user&#39;s profile and behavioral sequences through causal and logical inferences, representing the user&#39;s interests in an interpretable way. Our approach, LLMRG, has four components: chained graph reasoning, divergent extension, self-verification and scoring, and knowledge base self-improvement. The resulting reasoning graph is encoded using graph neural networks and provided as additional input to improve conventional recommender systems, without requiring more user or item data. This demonstrates how LLMs can enable more logical and interpretable recommender systems through personalized reasoning graphs. LLMRG allows recommendations to benefit from both engineered recommendation systems and LLM-derived reasoning graphs. We demonstrate LLMRG’s effectiveness on benchmarks and real-world scenarios for all base recommendation models. LLMRG provides a promising approach to combining the power of pre-trained language models and recommendation systems.

AAAI 2024

LLMRG: Improving Recommendations through Large Language Model Reasoning Graphs

reasoning graph

recommendation

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Recommendation systems aim to provide users with relevant suggestions, but often lack interpretability and fail to capture higher-level semantic relationships between user behaviors and profiles. We propose a novel approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to construct personalized reasoning graphs. These graphs link a user's profile and behavioral sequences through causal and logical inferences, representing the user's interests in an interpretable way. Our approach, LLMRG, has four components: chained graph reasoning, divergent extension, self-verification and scoring, and knowledge base self-improvement. The resulting reasoning graph is encoded using graph neural networks and provided as additional input to improve conventional recommender systems, without requiring more user or item data. This demonstrates how LLMs can enable more logical and interpretable recommender systems through personalized reasoning graphs. LLMRG allows recommendations to benefit from both engineered recommendation systems and LLM-derived reasoning graphs. We demonstrate LLMRG’s effectiveness on benchmarks and real-world scenarios for all base recommendation models. LLMRG provides a promising approach to combining the power of pre-trained language models and recommendation systems.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Conflict detection is relevant in various application scenarios, ranging from interactive decision-making to the diagnosis of faulty knowledge bases. Conflicts can be regarded as sets of constraints that cause an inconsistency. In many scenarios (e.g., constraint-based configuration), conflicts are repeatedly determined for the same or similar sets of constraints. This misses out on the valuable opportunity for leveraging knowledge reuse and related potential performance improvements, which are extremely important, specifically interactive constraint-based applications. In this paper, we show how to integrate knowledge reuse concepts into non-instructive conflict detection. We introduce the InformedQX algorithm, which is a reuse-aware variant of QuickXPlain. The results of a related performance analysis with the Linux-2.6.3.33 configuration knowledge base show significant improvements in terms of runtime performance compared to QuickXPlain.

INFORMEDQX: Informed Conflict Detection for Over-Constrained Problems | VIDEO

Video moment retrieval (MR) and highlight detection (HD) based on natural language queries are two highly related tasks, which aim to obtain relevant moments within videos and highlight scores of each video clip. Recently, several methods have been devoted to building DETR-based networks to solve both MR and HD jointly. These methods simply add two separate task heads after multi-modal feature extraction and feature interaction, achieving good performance. Nevertheless, these approaches underutilize the reciprocal relationship between two tasks. In this paper, we propose a task-reciprocal transformer based on DETR (TR-DETR) that focuses on exploring the inherent reciprocity between MR and HD. Specifically, a local-global multi-modal alignment module is first built to align features from diverse modalities into a shared latent space. Subsequently, a visual feature refinement is designed to eliminate query-irrelevant information from visual features for modal interaction. Finally, a task cooperation module is constructed to refine the retrieval pipeline and the highlight score prediction process by utilizing the reciprocity between MR and HD. Comprehensive experiments on QVHighlights, Charades-STA and TVSum datasets demonstrate that TR-DETR outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/mingyao1120/TR-DETR.

TR-DETR: Task-Reciprocal Transformer for Joint Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection

Exploring biologically plausible algorithms as alternatives to error backpropagation (BP) is a challenging research topic in artificial intelligence. It also provides insights into the brain's learning methods. Recently, when combined with well-designed feedback loss functions such as Local Difference Reconstruction Loss (LDRL) and through hierarchical training of feedback pathway synaptic weights, Target Propagation (TP) has achieved performance comparable to BP in image classification tasks. However, with an increase in the number of network layers, the tuning and training cost of feedback weights escalates. Drawing inspiration from the work of Ernoult et al., we propose a training method that seeks the optimal solution for feedback weights. This method enhances the efficiency of feedback training by analytically minimizing feedback loss, allowing the feedback layer to skip certain local training iterations. More specifically, we introduce the Jacobian matching loss (JML) for feedback training. We also proactively implement layers designed to derive analytical solutions that minimize JML. Through experiments, we have validated the effectiveness of this approach. Using the CIFAR-10 dataset, our method showcases accuracy levels comparable to state-of-the-art TP methods. Furthermore, we have explored its effectiveness in more intricate network architectures.

Efficient Target Propagation by Deriving Analytical Solution

Machine reasoning has made great progress in recent years owing to large language models (LLMs). In the clinical domain, however, most NLP-driven projects mainly focus on clinical classification or reading comprehension, and under-explore clinical reasoning for disease diagnosis due to the expensive rationale annotation with clinicians. In this work, we present a "reasoning-aware" diagnosis framework that rationalizes the diagnostic process via prompt-based learning in a time- and labor-efficient manner, and learns to reason over the prompt-generated rationales. Specifically, we address the clinical reasoning for disease diagnosis, where the LLM generates diagnostic rationales providing its insight on presented patient data and the reasoning path towards the diagnosis, namely Clinical Chain-of-Thought (Clinical CoT). We empirically demonstrate LLMs/LMs' ability of clinical reasoning via extensive experiments and analyses on both rationale generation and disease diagnosis in various settings. We further propose a novel set of criteria for evaluating machine-generated rationales' potential for real-world clinical settings, facilitating and benefiting future research in this area.

Large Language Models Are Clinical Reasoners: Reasoning-Aware Diagnosis Framework with Prompt-Generated Rationales

Graph neural networks (GNNs) and heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) are prominent techniques for homogeneous and heterogeneous graph representation learning, yet their performance in an end-to-end supervised framework greatly depends on the availability of task-specific supervision. To reduce the labeling cost, pre-training on self-supervised pretext tasks has become a popular paradigm, but there is often a gap between the pre-trained model and downstream tasks, stemming from the divergence in their objectives. To bridge the gap, prompt learning has risen as a promising direction especially in few-shot settings, without the need to fully fine-tune the pre-trained model. While there has been some early exploration of prompt-based learning on graphs, they primarily deal with homogeneous graphs, ignoring the heterogeneous graphs that are prevalent in downstream applications. In this paper, we propose HGPROMPT, a
novel pre-training and prompting framework to unify not only pre-training and downstream tasks but also homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs via a dual-template design. Moreover, we propose dual-prompt in HGPROMPT to assist a downstream task in locating the most relevant prior to bridge the gaps caused by not only feature variations but also heterogeneity differences across tasks. Finally, we thoroughly evaluate and analyze HGPROMPT through extensive experiments
on three public datasets.

HGPrompt: Bridging Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Graphs for Few-Shot Prompt Learning

Asking questions about visual environments is a crucial way for intelligent agents to understand rich multi-faceted scenes, raising the importance of Visual Question Generation (VQG) systems. Apart from being grounded to the image, existing VQG systems can use textual constraints, such as expected answers or knowledge triplets, to generate focused questions. These constraints allow VQG systems to specify the question content or leverage external commonsense knowledge that can not be obtained from the image content only. However, generating focused questions using textual constraints while enforcing a high relevance to the image content remains a challenge, as VQG systems often ignore one or both forms of grounding. In this work, we propose Contrastive Visual Question Generation (ConVQG), a method using a dual contrastive objective to discriminate questions generated using both modalities from those based on a single one. Experiments on both knowledge-aware and standard VQG benchmarks demonstrate that ConVQG outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and generates image-grounded, text-guided, and knowledge-rich questions. Our human evaluation results also show preference for ConVQG questions compared to non-contrastive baselines.

ConVQG: Contrastive Visual Question Generation with Multimodal Guidance

Multi-modal aspect-based sentiment analysis (MABSA) has recently attracted increasing attention. 
The span-based extraction methods, such as FSUIE, demonstrate strong performance in sentiment analysis due to their joint modeling of input sequences and target labels. However, previous methods still have certain limitations:
(i) They ignore the difference in the focus of visual information between different analysis targets (aspect or sentiment).
(ii) Combining features from uni-modal encoders directly may not be sufficient to eliminate the modal gap and can cause difficulties in capturing the image-text pairwise relevance.
(iii) Existing span-based methods for MABSA ignore the pairwise relevance of target span boundaries.
To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel framework called DQPSA. Specifically, our model contains a Prompt as Dual Query (PDQ) module that uses the prompt as both a visual query and a language query to extract prompt-aware visual information and strengthen the pairwise relevance between visual information and the analysis target. Additionally, we introduce an Energy-based Pairwise Expert (EPE) module that models the boundaries pairing of the analysis target from the perspective of an Energy-based Model. This expert predicts aspect or sentiment span based on pairwise stability.
Experiments on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate that DQPSA outperforms previous approaches and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance.

A Novel Energy Based Model Mechanism for Multi-Modal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

The recent proliferation of research into transformer based natural language processing has led to a number of studies which attempt to detect the presence of human-like cognitive behavior in the models. We contend that, as is true of human psychology, the investigation of cognitive behavior in language models must be conducted in an appropriate population of an appropriate size for the results to be meaningful. We leverage work in uncertainty estimation in a novel approach to efficiently construct experimental populations. The resultant tool, PopulationLM, has been made open source. We provide theoretical grounding in the uncertainty estimation literature and motivation from current cognitive work regarding language models. We discuss the methodological lessons from other scientific communities and attempt to demonstrate their application to two artificial population studies. Through population based experimentation we find that language models exhibit behavior consistent with typicality effects among categories highly represented in training. However, we find that language models don't tend to exhibit structural priming effects. Generally, our results show that single models tend to over estimate the presence of cognitive behaviors in neural models.

Using Artificial Populations to Study Psychological Phenomena in Neural Models

Multi-task learning (MTL) is essential for real-world applications that handle multiple tasks simultaneously, such as selfdriving cars. MTL methods improve the performance of all tasks by utilizing information across tasks to learn a robust shared representation. However, acquiring sufficient labeled data tends to be extremely expensive, especially when having to support many tasks. Recently, Knowledge Amalgamation (KA) has emerged as an effective strategy for addressing the lack of labels by instead learning directly from pretrained models (teachers). KA learns one unified multi-task student that masters all tasks across all teachers. Existing KA for MTL works are limited to teachers with identical architectures, and thus propose layer-to-layer based approaches. Unfortunately, in practice, teachers may have heterogeneous architectures; their layers may not be aligned and their dimensionalities or scales may be incompatible. Amalgamating multi-task teachers with heterogeneous architectures remains an open problem. For this, we design Versatile Common Feature Consolidator (VENUS), the first solution to this problem. VENUS fuses knowledge from the shared representations of each teacher into one unified generalized representation for all tasks. Specifically, we design the Feature Consolidator network that leverages an array of teacher-specific trainable adaptors. These adaptors enable the student to learn from multiple teachers, even if they have incompatible learned representations. We demonstrate that VENUS outperforms five alternative methods on numerous benchmark datasets across a broad spectrum of experiments.

Amalgamating Multi-Task Models with Heterogeneous Architectures

Biologically Inspired Design (BID), or Biomimicry, is a problem-solving methodology that applies analogies from nature to solve engineering challenges. For example, Speedo engineers designed swimsuits based on shark skin. Finding relevant biological solutions for real-world problems poses significant challenges, both due to the limited biological knowledge engineers and designers typically possess and to the limited BID resources. Existing BID datasets are hand-curated and small, and scaling them up requires costly human annotations.

In this paper, we introduce BARcode (Biological Analogy Retriever), a search engine for automatically mining bio-inspirations from the web at scale. Using advances in natural language understanding and data programming, BARcode identifies potential inspirations for engineering challenges. Our experiments demonstrate that BARcode can retrieve inspirations that are valuable to engineers and designers tackling real-world problems, as well as recover famous historical BID examples. We release data and code; we view BARcode as a step towards addressing the challenges that have historically hindered the practical application of BID to engineering innovation.

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