The sequential recommender (SR) system is a crucial component of modern recommender systems, as it aims to capture the evolving preferences of users. Significant efforts have been made to enhance the capabilities of SR systems. These methods typically follow the model-centric paradigm, which involves developing effective models based on fixed datasets. However, this approach often overlooks potential quality issues and flaws inherent in the data. Driven by the potential of data-centric AI, we propose a novel data-centric paradigm for developing an ideal training dataset using a model-agnostic dataset regeneration framework called DR4SR. This framework enables the regeneration of a dataset with exceptional cross-architecture generalizability. Additionally, we introduce the DR4SR+ framework, which incorporates a model-aware dataset personalizer to tailor the regenerated dataset specifically for a target model. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the data-centric paradigm, we integrate our framework with various model-centric methods and observe significant performance improvements across four widely adopted datasets. Furthermore, we conduct in-depth analyses to explore the potential of the data-centric paradigm and provide valuable insights. The code can be found at https://github.com/USTC-StarTeam/DR4SR.

Knowledge tracing (KT) is an intelligent educational technology used to model students’ learning progress and mastery in adaptive learning environments for personalized education. Despite utilizing deep learning models in KT, current approaches often oversimplify students’ exercise records into knowledge sequences, which fail to explore the rich information within individual questions. Additionally, existing KT models tend to neglect the complex, higher-order relationships between questions and latent concepts. Therefore, we introduce a novel model called Feature Crosses Information-based Knowledge Tracing (FCIKT) to explore the intricate interplay between questions, latent concepts, and question difficulties. FCIKT utilizes a fusion module to perform feature crosses operations on questions, integrating information from our constructed multi-relational heterogeneous graph using graph convolutional networks. We deployed a multi-head attention mechanism, which enriches the static embedding representations of questions and concepts with dynamic semantic information to simulate real-world scenarios of problem-solving. We also used gated recurrent units to dynamically capture and update the students’ knowledge state for final prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrated the validity and interpretability of our proposed model.

Multimodal Entity Linking (MEL) aims to address the ambiguity in multimodal mentions and associate them with Multimodal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs). Existing works primarily focus on designing multimodal interaction and fusion mechanisms to enhance the performance of MEL. However, these methods still overlook two crucial gaps within the MEL task. One is the content discrepancy between mentions and entities, manifested as uneven information density. The other is the knowledge gap, indicating insufficient knowledge extraction and reasoning during the linking process. To bridge these gaps, we propose a novel framework FissFuse, as well as a plug-and-play knowledge-aware re-ranking method KAR. Specifically, FissFuse collaborates with the Fission and Fusion branches, establishing dynamic features for each mention-entity pair and adaptively learning multimodal interactions to alleviate content discrepancy. Meanwhile, KAR is endowed with carefully crafted instruction for intricate knowledge reasoning, serving as re-ranking agents empowered by Large Language Models (LLMs). Extensive experiments on two well-constructed MEL datasets demonstrate outstanding performance of FissFuse compared with various baselines. Comprehensive evaluations and ablation experiments validate the effectiveness and generality of KAR.

Last year has witnessed the re-flourishment of tag-aware recommender systems supported by the LLM-enriched tags. Unfortunately, though large efforts have been made, current solutions may fail to describe the diversity and uncertainty inherent in user preferences with only tag-driven profiles. Recently, with the development of geometry-based techniques, e.g., box embeddings, the diversity of user preferences now could be fully modeled as the range within a box in high dimension space. However, defect still exists as these approaches are incapable of capturing high-order neighbor signals, i.e., semantic-rich multi-hop relations within the user-tag-item tripartite graph, which severely limits the effectiveness of user modeling. To deal with this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel framework, called BoxGNN, to perform message aggregation via combinations of logical operations, thereby incorporating high-order signals. Specifically, we first embed users, items, and tags as hyper-boxes rather than simple points in the representation space, and define two logical operations, i.e., union and intersection, to facilitate the subsequent process. Next, we perform the message aggregation mechanism via the combination of logical operations, to obtain the corresponding high-order box representations. Finally, we adopt a volume-based learning objective with Gumbel smoothing techniques to refine the representation of boxes. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets and one LLM-enhanced e-commerce dataset have validated the superiority of BoxGNN compared with various state-of-the-art baselines. The code is released online: https://github.com/critical88/BoxGNN.

Roll call vote prediction is a research field in quantitative political science that is crucial for understanding the legislative process and assessing the impact of political decisions. Much of the current work incorporates contextual information about legislation and legislators, relying on historical voting data to learn about legislation and preferences of legislators. However, these efforts have paid insufficient attention to characterizing the important role of cosponsors in legislation. In practical scenarios, whether a legislator votes for or against a bill is largely related to the cosponsors. To address the above challenge, in this article, we propose a group enhanced roll call vote prediction model, which considers cosponsors as a group. Specifically, we first reconstruct the historical cosponsorship network to obtain an accurate graph of relationships among legislators, and we utilize a GNN to obtain the preferences of legislators. Then, we propose an individual aggregation method to obtain the representation of groups and we further employ the BERT model to obtain the representation of legislative texts. We further integrate these representations by attention mechanisms to gain the final representation of legislation. It is worth mentioning that in the group representation component, considering the large size of some groups and the significant differences among group members, we apply self-attention mechanism within the group and prune members based on attention scores. Finally, we input the obtained representations of legislation and legislators into an MLP layer to obtain the final voting results of legislators on the legislation. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate the competitiveness of our model compared to state-of-the-art baseline methods.