arXiv subjects

Minmao Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Minmao Wang.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Understanding to Action: Feedback-Grounded Policy Discovery for Generative Recommendation

Semantic-ID-based generative recommenders enable efficient next-item generation, but their item-level supervision mainly captures behavioral co-occurrence and local transitions. Large language models (LLMs) can complement these models by reasoning over heterogeneous interaction histories to understand the user's current demand. However, LLMs are not inherently trained with recommendation-specific outcome feedback, and linguistically plausible reasoning therefore does not necessarily lead to effective recommendation decisions. We term this mismatch the Understanding-Action Gap. Accordingly, we distinguish intent knowledge, which captures the user's current demand, from policy knowledge, which specifies the recommendation direction and rejection boundary under that demand. To bridge this gap, we propose a feedback-driven agent framework that first induces task-oriented intent and then discovers recommendation policies according to their incremental utility over an intent-only baseline. Candidate policies are evaluated and refined using outcome-derived feedback rather than linguistic plausibility. We further transfer the resulting intent and policy knowledge into two latent tokens of a lightweight Semantic-ID generator through dual-space relational distillation, enabling LLM-free online inference. Experiments on public benchmarks show consistent improvements over baselines, while large-scale online A/B tests achieve gains of 4.506% in Revenue and 4.621% in ADVV.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

OneReason Technical Report

Generative recommendation models in the OneRec family have been widely deployed in many real-world services, such as short-video, live-streaming, advertising, and e-commerce. However, these generative models can only benefit from the scaling advantage, while their reasoning ability is hard to activate, since we cannot construct meaningful Chain-of-Thought (CoT) sequences consisting of itemic tokens only. Inspired by the success of the reasoning-style ``think before answer'' paradigm in the LLM field, we conduct preliminary studies (i.e., OneRec-Think, OpenOneRec) to explore reasoning capability in generative recommendation. Nevertheless, we notice an unexpected phenomenon: the thinking mode does not show advantages over the non-thinking mode. Drawing insights from recent findings on CoT robustness in multi-modal language models, we argue that effective reasoning in recommendation rests on two factors: perception, the ability to ground itemic tokens in their underlying language semantics, and cognition, the ability to reorganize a user's behavior sequence into coherent latent interest points. We therefore propose OneReason, which includes: (1) strong itemic token perception in pre-training, (2) a three-level cognition-enhanced CoT format for recommendation tasks in SFT, and (3) a specialize-then-unify training recipe in RL to enhance the thinking ability.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

WSDM Cup 2026 Multilingual Retrieval: A Low-Cost Multi-Stage Retrieval Pipeline

We present a low-cost retrieval system for the WSDM Cup 2026 multilingual retrieval task, where English queries are used to retrieve relevant documents from a collection of approximately ten million news articles in Chinese, Persian, and Russian, and to output the top-1000 ranked results for each query. We follow a four-stage pipeline that combines LLM-based GRF-style query expansion with BM25 candidate retrieval, dense ranking using long-text representations from jina-embeddings-v4, and pointwise re-ranking of the top-20 candidates using Qwen3-Reranker-4B while preserving the dense order for the remaining results. On the official evaluation, the system achieves nDCG@20 of 0.403 and Judged@20 of 0.95. We further conduct extensive ablation experiments to quantify the contribution of each stage and to analyze the effectiveness of query expansion, dense ranking, and top-$k$ reranking under limited compute budgets.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Hierarchical Semantic RL: Tackling the Problem of Dynamic Action Space for RL-based Recommendations

Recommender Systems (RS) are fundamental to modern online services. While most existing approaches optimize for short-term engagement, recent work has begun to explore reinforcement learning (RL) to model long-term user value. However, these efforts face significant challenges due to the vast, dynamic action spaces inherent in RS, which hinder stable policy learning. To resolve this bottleneck, we introduce Hierarchical Semantic RL (HSRL), which reframes RL-based recommendation over a fixed Semantic Action Space (SAS). HSRL encodes items as Semantic IDs (SIDs) for policy learning, and maps SIDs back to their original items via a fixed lookup during execution. To align decision-making with SID generation, the Hierarchical Policy Network (HPN) operates in a coarse-to-fine manner, employing hierarchical residual state modeling to refine each level's context from the previous level's residual, thereby reducing representation-decision mismatch. In parallel, a Multi-level Critic (MLC) provides token-level value estimates, enabling fine-grained credit assignment. Across public benchmarks and a large-scale production dataset from a leading short-video advertising platform, HSRL consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines. In online deployment over a 7-day A/B testing, it delivers an 18.421% ADVV lift and a 1.251% increase in Revenue, supporting HSRL as a scalable paradigm for RL-based recommendation.

cs.IR↗