arXiv subjects

Enneng Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Enneng Yang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

LLM Evolution as an Industry-Scale Ecosystem: A Lifecycle Perspective on Continual Learning

Continual learning capability is critical for Industrial LLMs, as deployed models must be continuously updated to meet evolving requirements and environments, rather than repeatedly retrained from scratch. However, most existing research focuses on improvements on static benchmarks, failing to capture real industrial needs. In this survey, we reformulate Industrial Continual Learning (ICL) for LLMs as a closed-loop update-and-release problem in a versioned ecosystem, where updates propagate hierarchically to industrial, application-specific models and LLM-powered applications, with capability inheritance and transfer across versions and model families. From this ecosystem perspective, we identify three core challenges: repeated adaptation erodes model plasticity, foundation-model upgrades break capability inheritance, and long-term sustainability is constrained by deployment requirements. We then organize the technical landscape of ICL around five lifecycle design principles: preserving plasticity headroom, treating upgrades as capability transfer, enabling trustworthy continual reinforcement learning, making training recipes self-optimizing, and building accountability as a base layer for long-term iteration. For each principle, we synthesize representative technical directions. Finally, we evaluate the maturity of each principle and its technical components via an evidence-based lens, identify key gaps hindering real-world deployment, and outline a practical ICL deployment blueprint and a pathway for feeding industrial realities back into academic research.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Causal Direct Preference Optimization for Distributionally Robust Generative Recommendation

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) guides large language models (LLMs) to generate recommendations aligned with user historical behavior distributions by minimizing preference alignment loss. However, our systematic empirical research and theoretical analysis reveal that DPO tends to amplify spurious correlations caused by environmental confounders during the alignment process, significantly undermining the generalization capability of LLM-based generative recommendation methods in out of distribution (OOD) scenarios. To mitigate this issue, we propose CausalDPO, an extension of DPO that incorporates a causal invariance learning mechanism. This method introduces a backdoor adjustment strategy during the preference alignment phase to eliminate interference from environmental confounders, explicitly models the latent environmental distribution using a soft clustering approach, and enhances robust consistency across diverse environments through invariance constraints. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that CausalDPO can effectively capture users stable preference structures across multiple environments, thereby improving the OOD generalization performance of LLM-based recommendation models. We conduct extensive experiments under four representative distribution shift settings to validate the effectiveness of CausalDPO, achieving an average performance improvement of 17.17% across four evaluation metrics.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Mitigating Safety Tax via Distribution-Grounded Refinement in Large Reasoning Models

Safety alignment incurs safety tax that perturbs a large reasoning model's (LRM) general reasoning ability. Existing datasets used for safety alignment for an LRM are usually constructed by distilling safety reasoning traces and answers from an external LRM or human labeler. However, such reasoning traces and answers exhibit a distributional gap with the target LRM that needs alignment, and we conjecture such distributional gap is the culprit leading to significant degradation of reasoning ability of the target LRM. Driven by this hypothesis, we propose a safety alignment dataset construction method, dubbed DGR. DGR transforms and refines an existing out-of-distributional safety reasoning dataset to be aligned with the target's LLM inner distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that i) DGR effectively mitigates the safety tax while maintaining safety performance across all baselines, i.e., achieving \textbf{+30.2\%} on DirectRefusal and \textbf{+21.2\%} on R1-ACT improvement in average reasoning accuracy compared to Vanilla SFT; ii) the degree of reasoning degradation correlates with the extent of distribution shift, suggesting that bridging this gap is central to preserving capabilities. Furthermore, we find that safety alignment in LRMs may primarily function as a mechanism to activate latent knowledge, as a mere \textbf{10} samples are sufficient for activating effective refusal behaviors. These findings not only emphasize the importance of distributional consistency but also provide insights into the activation mechanism of safety in reasoning models.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

ECHO: Entropy-Confidence Hybrid Optimization for Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

Test-time reinforcement learning generates multiple candidate answers via repeated rollouts and performs online updates using pseudo-labels constructed by majority voting. To reduce overhead and improve exploration, prior work introduces tree structured rollouts, which share reasoning prefixes and branch at key nodes to improve sampling efficiency. However, this paradigm still faces two challenges: (1) high entropy branching can trigger rollout collapse, where the branching budget concentrates on a few trajectories with consecutive high-entropy segments, rapidly reducing the number of effective branches; (2) early pseudo-labels are noisy and biased, which can induce self-reinforcing overfitting, causing the policy to sharpen prematurely and suppress exploration. To address these issues, we propose Entropy Confidence Hybrid Group Relative Policy Optimization (ECHO). During rollout, ECHO jointly leverages local entropy and group level confidence to adaptively control branch width, and further introduces online confidence-based pruning to terminate persistently low confidence branches, avoiding high entropy traps and mitigating collapse. During policy updates, ECHO employs confidence adaptive clipping and an entropy confidence hybrid advantage shaping approach to enhance training robustness and mitigate early stage bias. Experiments demonstrate that ECHO achieves consistent gains on multiple mathematical and visual reasoning benchmarks, and generalizes more effectively under a limited rollout budget.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

MMGRid: Navigating Temporal-aware and Cross-domain Generative Recommendation via Model Merging

Model merging (MM) offers an efficient mechanism for integrating multiple specialized models without access to original training data or costly retraining. While MM has demonstrated success in domains like computer vision, its role in recommender systems (RSs) remains largely unexplored. Recently, Generative Recommendation (GR) has emerged as a new paradigm in RSs, characterized by rapidly growing model scales and substantial computational costs, making MM particularly appealing for cost-sensitive deployment scenarios. In this work, we present the first systematic study of MM in GR through a contextual lens. We focus on a fundamental yet underexplored challenge in real-world: how to merge generative recommenders specialized to different real-world contexts, arising from temporal evolving user behaviors and heterogeneous application domains. To this end, we propose a unified framework MMGRid, a structured contextual grid of GR checkpoints that organizes models trained under diverse contexts induced by temporal evolution and domain diversity. All checkpoints are derived from a shared base LLM but fine-tuned on context-specific data, forming a realistic and controlled model space for systematically analyzing MM across GR paradigms and merging algorithms. Our investigation reveals several key insights. First, training GR models from LLMs can introduce parameter conflicts during merging due to token distribution shifts and objective disparities; such conflicts can be alleviated by disentangling task-aware and context-specific parameter changes via base model replacement. Second, incremental training across contexts induces recency bias, which can be effectively balanced through weighted contextual merging. Notably, we observe that optimal merging weights correlate with context-dependent interaction characteristics, offering practical guidance for weight selection in real-world deployments.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Automatic Pruning Discovery for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on a wide range of tasks, hindering real-world deployment due to their massive size. Existing pruning methods (e.g., Wanda) tailored for LLMs rely heavily on manual design pruning algorithms, thereby leading to huge labor costs and requires expert knowledge. Furthermore, we are the first to identify the serious outlier value issue behind dramatic performance degradation under high pruning ratios that are caused by uniform sparsity, raising an additional concern about how to design adaptive pruning sparsity ideal for LLMs. Can LLMs prune by themselves? In this work, we introduce an affirmative answer by proposing a novel pruning method called AutoPrune, which first overcomes expert knowledge limits by leveraging LLMs to design optimal pruning algorithm for themselves automatically without any expert knowledge. Specifically, to mitigate the black-box nature of LLMs, we propose a Graph-driven Chain-of-Thought (GCoT) to optimize prompts, significantly enhancing the reasoning process in learning the pruning algorithm and enabling us to generate pruning algorithms with superior performance and interpretability in the next generation. Finally, grounded in insights of outlier value issue, we introduce Skew-aware Dynamic Sparsity Allocation (SDSA) to overcome the outlier value issue, mitigating performance degradation under high pruning ratios. We conduct extensive experiments on mainstream LLMs benchmarks, demonstrating the superiority of AutoPrune, which consistently excels state-of-the-art competitors.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Model Unmerging: Making Your Models Unmergeable for Secure Model Sharing

Model merging leverages multiple finetuned expert models to construct a multi-task model with low cost, and is gaining increasing attention. However, as a growing number of finetuned models become publicly available, concerns about the safety of model merging have emerged. Unauthorized merging may infringe on developers' rights and risk leaking sensitive personal information. Most existing methods focus on detecting whether a merged model originates from a specific source model, but fail to effectively prevent illegal merging. In this paper, we propose MergeLock, an active protection mechanism that disrupts model parameters to render them unmergeable, thereby directly preventing unauthorized model merging. Specifically, leveraging the inherent symmetry of the attention mechanism in Transformer-based models, we randomly sample two pairs of invertible matrices and apply them to the Query-Key (QK) and Value-Output (VO) branches. This transformation keeps the model's output unchanged while pushing it away from the shared parameter space of other finetuned models. Extensive experiments across both vision and language tasks demonstrate that MergeLock can degrade the performance of merged models by over 95% when a protected model is involved in most cases, demonstrating its effectiveness. Moreover, we further demonstrate that merged models protected by MergeLock cannot be effectively recovered using low-cost restoration methods, further enhancing robustness against unauthorized merging. The code is available at https://github.com/hetailang/Merge-Lock.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

OptMerge: Unifying Multimodal LLM Capabilities and Modalities via Model Merging

Foundation models update slowly due to resource-intensive training, whereas domain-specific models evolve rapidly between releases. Model merging seeks to combine multiple expert models into a single, more capable model, reducing storage and serving costs while supporting decentralized development. Despite its potential, previous studies have primarily focused on merging visual classification models or Large Language Models (LLMs) for code and math tasks. Recently, Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) that extend LLMs through large-scale multimodal training have gained traction. However, there lacks a benchmark for model merging research that clearly divides the tasks for MLLM training and evaluation. In this paper, $\textbf{(i)}$ we introduce a model merging benchmark for MLLMs, which includes multiple tasks such as VQA, Geometry, Chart, OCR, and Grounding, studying both LoRA and full fine-tuning models. Moreover, we explore how model merging can combine different modalities (e.g., vision-language, audio-language, and video-language models), moving toward the Omni-language model. $\textbf{(ii)}$ We implement 10 model merging algorithms on the benchmark. Furthermore, we propose a novel method that removes noise from task vectors and robustly optimizes the merged vector based on a loss defined over task vector interactions, achieving an average performance gain of 2.48%. $\textbf{(iii)}$ We find that model merging offers a promising way for building improved MLLMs without requiring training data. Our results also demonstrate that the complementarity among multiple modalities outperforms individual modalities.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Hard Negative Sampling via Large Language Models for Recommendation

Hard negative sampling improves recommendation performance by accelerating convergence and sharpening the decision boundary. However, most existing methods rely on heuristic strategies, selecting negatives from a fixed candidate pool. Lacking semantic awareness, these methods often misclassify items that align with users' semantic interests as negatives, resulting in False Hard Negative Samples (FHNS). Such FHNS inject noisy supervision and hinder the model's optimal performance. To address this challenge, we propose HNLMRec, a generative semantic negative sampling framework. Leveraging the semantic reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), HNLMRec directly generates negative samples that are behaviorally distinct yet semantically relevant with respect to user preferences. Furthermore, we integrate collaborative filtering signals into the LLM via supervised fine-tuning, guiding the model to synthesize more reliable and informative hard negatives. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that HNLMRec significantly outperforms traditional methods and LLM-enhanced baselines, while effectively mitigating popularity bias and data sparsity, thereby improving generalization.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Data Augmentation as Free Lunch: Exploring the Test-Time Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation

Data augmentation has become a promising method of mitigating data sparsity in sequential recommendation. Existing methods generate new yet effective data during model training to improve performance. However, deploying them requires retraining, architecture modification, or introducing additional learnable parameters. The above steps are time-consuming and costly for well-trained models, especially when the model scale becomes large. In this work, we explore the test-time augmentation (TTA) for sequential recommendation, which augments the inputs during the model inference and then aggregates the model's predictions for augmented data to improve final accuracy. It avoids significant time and cost overhead from loss calculation and backward propagation. We first experimentally disclose the potential of existing augmentation operators for TTA and find that the Mask and Substitute consistently achieve better performance. Further analysis reveals that these two operators are effective because they retain the original sequential pattern while adding appropriate perturbations. Meanwhile, we argue that these two operators still face time-consuming item selection or interference information from mask tokens. Based on the analysis and limitations, we present TNoise and TMask. The former injects uniform noise into the original representation, avoiding the computational overhead of item selection. The latter blocks mask token from participating in model calculations or directly removes interactions that should have been replaced with mask tokens. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and generalizability of our method. We provide an anonymous implementation at https://github.com/KingGugu/TTA4SR.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Efficient and Effective Prompt Tuning via Prompt Decomposition and Compressed Outer Product

Prompt tuning (PT) offers a cost-effective alternative to fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs), requiring only a few parameters in soft prompt tokens added before the input text. However, existing PT approaches face two significant issues: (i) They overlook intrinsic semantic associations between soft prompt tokens, leading to high discreteness and limited interactions, thus reducing the model's comprehension and effectiveness in complex tasks. (ii) Due to the complexity of downstream tasks, long soft prompt is necessitated to improve performance, but prompt length correlates positively with memory usage and computational costs. Achieving high efficiency and performance remains an ongoing challenge. To address these issues, we propose a novel Low-parameters prompt tuning (LAMP) method, which leverages prompt decomposition and compressed outer product. Specifically, the prompt decomposition module employs Truncated SVD to reduce training parameters and significantly lower the dimensionality of the soft prompt parameter space. It then utilizes a compressed outer product module to facilitate multiple interactions among prompt tokens, exploring their intrinsic associations to enhance knowledge representation. Finally, LAMP uses average pooling to reduce memory usage and training/inference time. Extensive experiments across six architectures and eight datasets demonstrate that LAMP outperforms state-of-the-art PT-based and LoRA-based methods in performance and efficiency.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Distributionally Robust Graph Out-of-Distribution Recommendation via Diffusion Model

The distributionally robust optimization (DRO)-based graph neural network methods improve recommendation systems' out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization by optimizing the model's worst-case performance. However, these studies fail to consider the impact of noisy samples in the training data, which results in diminished generalization capabilities and lower accuracy. Through experimental and theoretical analysis, this paper reveals that current DRO-based graph recommendation methods assign greater weight to noise distribution, leading to model parameter learning being dominated by it. When the model overly focuses on fitting noise samples in the training data, it may learn irrelevant or meaningless features that cannot be generalized to OOD data. To address this challenge, we design a Distributionally Robust Graph model for OOD recommendation (DRGO). Specifically, our method first employs a simple and effective diffusion paradigm to alleviate the noisy effect in the latent space. Additionally, an entropy regularization term is introduced in the DRO objective function to avoid extreme sample weights in the worst-case distribution. Finally, we provide a theoretical proof of the generalization error bound of DRGO as well as a theoretical analysis of how our approach mitigates noisy sample effects, which helps to better understand the proposed framework from a theoretical perspective. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our framework against three typical distribution shifts, and the results demonstrate its superiority in both independently and identically distributed distributions (IID) and OOD.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Merging Models on the Fly Without Retraining: A Sequential Approach to Scalable Continual Model Merging

Deep model merging represents an emerging research direction that combines multiple fine-tuned models to harness their specialized capabilities across different tasks and domains. Current model merging techniques focus on merging all available models simultaneously, with weight interpolation-based methods being the predominant approaches. However, these conventional approaches are not well-suited for scenarios where models become available sequentially, and they often suffer from high memory requirements and potential interference between tasks. In this study, we propose a training-free projection-based continual merging method that processes models sequentially through orthogonal projections of weight matrices and adaptive scaling mechanisms. Our method operates by projecting new parameter updates onto subspaces orthogonal to existing merged parameter updates while using an adaptive scaling mechanism to maintain stable parameter distances, enabling efficient sequential integration of task-specific knowledge. Our approach maintains constant memory complexity to the number of models, minimizes interference between tasks through orthogonal projections, and retains the performance of previously merged models through adaptive task vector scaling. Extensive experiments on CLIP-ViT models demonstrate that our method achieves a 5-8% average accuracy improvement while maintaining robust performance in different task orderings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Augmenting Sequential Recommendation with Balanced Relevance and Diversity

By generating new yet effective data, data augmentation has become a promising method to mitigate the data sparsity problem in sequential recommendation. Existing works focus on augmenting the original data but rarely explore the issue of imbalanced relevance and diversity for augmented data, leading to semantic drift problems or limited performance improvements. In this paper, we propose a novel Balanced data Augmentation Plugin for Sequential Recommendation (BASRec) to generate data that balance relevance and diversity. BASRec consists of two modules: Single-sequence Augmentation and Cross-sequence Augmentation. The former leverages the randomness of the heuristic operators to generate diverse sequences for a single user, after which the diverse and the original sequences are fused at the representation level to obtain relevance. Further, we devise a reweighting strategy to enable the model to learn the preferences based on the two properties adaptively. The Cross-sequence Augmentation performs nonlinear mixing between different sequence representations from two directions. It produces virtual sequence representations that are diverse enough but retain the vital semantics of the original sequences. These two modules enhance the model to discover fine-grained preferences knowledge from single-user and cross-user perspectives. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of BASRec. The average improvement is up to 72.0% on GRU4Rec, 33.8% on SASRec, and 68.5% on FMLP-Rec. We demonstrate that BASRec generates data with a better balance between relevance and diversity than existing methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/KingGugu/BASRec.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Self-supervised Hierarchical Representation for Medication Recommendation

Medication recommender is to suggest appropriate medication combinations based on a patient's health history, e.g., diagnoses and procedures. Existing works represent different diagnoses/procedures well separated by one-hot encodings. However, they ignore the latent hierarchical structures of these medical terms, undermining the generalization performance of the model. For example, "Respiratory Diseases", "Chronic Respiratory Diseases" and "Chronic Bronchiti" have a hierarchical relationship, progressing from general to specific. To address this issue, we propose a novel hierarchical encoder named HIER to hierarchically represent diagnoses and procedures, which is based on standard medical codes and compatible with any existing methods. Specifically, the proposed method learns relation embedding with a self-supervised objective for incorporating the neighbor hierarchical structure. Additionally, we develop the position encoding to explicitly introduce global hierarchical position. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant and consistent improvements in recommendation accuracy across four baselines and two real-world clinical datasets.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Efficient and Effective Weight-Ensembling Mixture of Experts for Multi-Task Model Merging

Multi-task learning (MTL) leverages a shared model to accomplish multiple tasks and facilitate knowledge transfer. Recent research on task arithmetic-based MTL demonstrates that merging the parameters of independently fine-tuned models can effectively achieve MTL. However, existing merging methods primarily seek a static optimal solution within the original model parameter space, which often results in performance degradation due to the inherent diversity among tasks and potential interferences. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Weight-Ensembling Mixture of Experts (WEMoE) method for multi-task model merging. Specifically, we first identify critical (or sensitive) modules by analyzing parameter variations in core modules of Transformer-based models before and after finetuning. Then, our WEMoE statically merges non-critical modules while transforming critical modules into a mixture-of-experts (MoE) structure. During inference, expert modules in the MoE are dynamically merged based on input samples, enabling a more flexible and adaptive merging approach. Building on WEMoE, we further introduce an efficient-and-effective WEMoE (E-WEMoE) method, whose core mechanism involves eliminating non-essential elements in the critical modules of WEMoE and implementing shared routing across multiple MoE modules, thereby significantly reducing both the trainable parameters, the overall parameter count, and computational overhead of the merged model by WEMoE. Experimental results across various architectures and tasks demonstrate that both WEMoE and E-WEMoE outperform state-of-the-art (SOTA) model merging methods in terms of MTL performance, generalization, and robustness.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

SurgeryV2: Bridging the Gap Between Model Merging and Multi-Task Learning with Deep Representation Surgery

Model merging-based multitask learning (MTL) offers a promising approach for performing MTL by merging multiple expert models without requiring access to raw training data. However, in this paper, we examine the merged model's representation distribution and uncover a critical issue of "representation bias". This bias arises from a significant distribution gap between the representations of the merged and expert models, leading to the suboptimal performance of the merged MTL model. To address this challenge, we first propose a representation surgery solution called Surgery. Surgery is a lightweight, task-specific module that aligns the final layer representations of the merged model with those of the expert models, effectively alleviating bias and improving the merged model's performance. Despite these improvements, a performance gap remains compared to the traditional MTL method. Further analysis reveals that representation bias phenomena exist at each layer of the merged model, and aligning representations only in the last layer is insufficient for fully reducing systemic bias because biases introduced at each layer can accumulate and interact in complex ways. To tackle this, we then propose a more comprehensive solution, deep representation surgery (also called SurgeryV2), which mitigates representation bias across all layers, and thus bridges the performance gap between model merging-based MTL and traditional MTL. Finally, we design an unsupervised optimization objective to optimize both the Surgery and SurgeryV2 modules. Our experimental results show that incorporating these modules into state-of-the-art (SOTA) model merging schemes leads to significant performance gains. Notably, our SurgeryV2 scheme reaches almost the same level as individual expert models or the traditional MTL model. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/EnnengYang/SurgeryV2}.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Data Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation: A Survey

As an essential branch of recommender systems, sequential recommendation (SR) has received much attention due to its well-consistency with real-world situations. However, the widespread data sparsity issue limits the SR model's performance. Therefore, researchers have proposed many data augmentation (DA) methods to mitigate this phenomenon and have achieved impressive progress. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of DA methods for SR. We start by introducing the research background and motivation. Then, we categorize existing methodologies regarding their augmentation principles, objects, and purposes. Next, we present a comparative discussion of their advantages and disadvantages, followed by the exhibition and analysis of representative experimental results. Finally, we outline directions for future research and summarize this survey. We also maintain a repository with a paper list at \url{https://github.com/KingGugu/DA-CL-4Rec}.

cs.IR↗