PreGress is proposed, the first ranking-native pre-training and prompting framework for supporting a wide range of node ranking tasks, and designs lightweight, task-specific prompt modules that adapt a frozen ranking backbone to downstream tasks without full retraining.
Abstract
Node ranking is a fundamental problem in graph information retrieval, measuring the relative importance of nodes and supporting a wide range of applications such as influence analysis, recommendation, and graph-based retrieval augmented generation. However, exact computation of graph-based ranking measures is often computationally prohibitive at scale. Existing GNN-based ranking methods provide scalable approximations, but they are typically tailored to individual ranking criteria and require retraining for each downstream task, which limits their transferability and efficiency. Recent graph pre-training approaches aim to enable knowledge transfer across tasks, yet their learning objectives are largely misaligned with node ranking, resulting in suboptimal adaptability to ranking-oriented applications. To address these limitations, we propose PreGress, the first ranking-native pre-training and prompting framework for supporting a wide range of node ranking tasks. PreGress performs multi-task pre-training using our carefully designed objectives, including degree centrality prediction and attribute reconstruction, to jointly capture structural and attribute information. To support heterogeneous ranking criteria, we design lightweight, task-specific prompt modules that adapt a frozen ranking backbone to downstream tasks without full retraining. Experiments on six public graphs and two real-world query-to-item benchmarks---Yelp2018 and MovieLens-100K---together with a controlled five-criterion graph-access study demonstrate strong ranking quality with low task-specific state overhead.
In modern recommendation systems, retrieval serves as a primary stage responsible for filtering billions of candidate items down to thousands prior to refined ranking. To make this massive search effective and efficient, the system relies on ranking accuracy and indexing efficiency. However, these two objectives are traditionally misaligned: while the former optimizes for the alignment between ranking predictions and user behavior, the latter optimizes for a structural grouping of item representations which enables fast search among billions of candidates. Thus, despite extensive efforts to scale up interaction modeling for retrieval, they remain fundamentally limited by the structural misalignment between the ranking objectives and the proximity-learned index. In this work, we address this long-standing dichotomy by proposing a new holistic retrieval framework, OneShot. It is an end-to-end, in-model index learning framework that natively aligns index learning with ranking objectives. Using this joint learning as a structural foundation, OneShot pushes the boundaries of retrieval expressiveness by scaling interaction modeling with neural scoring beyond the persistent dot-product bottleneck. OneShot is fully deployed in Instagram's industrial short-video recommendation system, driving significant wins in user daily sessions, engagement, and time-spent. Additionally, OneShot achieves a $20\%$ recall gain at the operational ranking volume and a 10x efficiency improvement at an equivalent recall level.
Ziwei Li, Shuyao Li, Xu Cai et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
Reranking is a combinatorial decision problem that aims to select and order a high-utility slate from a request-specific candidate set. A major line of generative rerankers adopts autoregressive (AR) models, which construct the slate one position at a time to capture inter-position dependencies. However, under practical greedy or bounded-width decoding, prefix-based search may prematurely prune globally promising permutations and incurs inherently sequential latency, restricting the effective search space under a fixed serving budget. Non-autoregressive (NAR) alternatives alleviate this efficiency bottleneck through position-parallel prediction, but naive position-wise factorization treats different positions too independently, leading to insufficient cross-position coordination and potentially duplicate or conflicting item selections. To retain parallel efficiency while introducing global structural coordination, we propose Dynamic Index-based RECommendation with Transport-Optimized Retrieval (DIRECTOR), a transport-guided parallel reranking framework. DIRECTOR maps candidate items into a continuous latent space and generates request-conditioned dynamic retrieval indices for all target positions in parallel. During training, it uses entropy-regularized OT to provide conflict-aware supervision; at inference, it directly performs global hard matching on similarity matrix, producing duplicate-free slates without iterative transport. To further align the generator with an opaque list-wise evaluator that returns only a scalar utility, we introduce a prefix-anchored credit assignment mechanism that converts the global reward into position-specific training signals. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate that DIRECTOR consistently outperforms strong reranking baselines, achieving significant improvement in large-scale industrial recommendation scenarios.
Large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for recommendation by interpreting item descriptions, user instructions, and external knowledge through natural-language prompts. However, existing graph-augmented LLM recommenders often use knowledge graphs mainly as prompt-level evidence, leaving ranking decisions weakly constrained by structured user-item relations. This is problematic for next-item recommendation, where the model must compare candidates under the same user context while preserving temporal preference, collaborative signals, and attribute matches. To address this issue, we propose \emph{GARDRec}, a Graph-grounded Adaptive Reasoning and Decision-aware Recommendation framework for LLM-based next-item ranking. GARDRec constructs semantic-structural item representations from textual node features and graph propagation, derives personalized graph contexts from temporally weighted histories and first-order neighborhoods, and aligns graph-derived representations with a frozen LLM through continuous multimodal prompts. Explicit interaction and matching features are injected through late-stage decision branches, while inter-candidate attention and restricted generative likelihood support final ranking. Experiments on three public benchmarks with multiple LLM backbones show that GARDRec generally improves candidate-ranking performance over representative baselines. Ablation and diagnostic analyses verify the contributions of graph projection, neighborhood retrieval, explicit decision features, ranking loss, and generative calibration.
Yong Wang, Hongliang Sun, Jin-Lan Liu et al.· 0 citations
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task in personalized recommender systems. Existing methods that align collaborative information from conventional CTR models with semantic information from pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated superior performance compared to approaches relying on a single information source. However, most of them perform alignment at the embedding level, which introduces noise from heterogeneous vector spaces and limits fine-grained semantic mapping. Moreover, these models highly depend on tabular features, thereby limiting their transferability. To address these challenges, we propose to conduct Multi-scale Graph Tokens Alignment (MGTA) for CTR prediction via pre-trained language models, which enables deep cross-modal information alignment while maintaining strong generalizability. Specifically, MGTA first captures multi-scale graph tokens rich in collaborative signals by decoupling and quantizing graph structures based on graph neural networks (GNNs), and then achieves token-level alignment between collaborative signals and semantic knowledge via PLM fine-tuning. To achieve efficient transfer with MGTA, we further introduce the Cross-domain Token Adapter that enables collaborative signals adaptation by mapping graph tokens from the target domain to the source domain, which necessitates only the injection of target-domain semantic knowledge, in turn reducing fine-tuning time. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MGTA compared to existing baselines.
Zhongzheng Wu, Yating Ren, Shuocheng Li et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
Algorithm selection remains a challenging task due to the absence of standardized tools that support informed decision-making for identifying suitable algorithms for AI and ML tasks. It plays a crucial role in designing and deploying intelligent systems. This paper presents Hybrirank, a hybrid framework that ranks algorithms by integrating two components, dataset-based benchmarking module that evaluates performance on varied domain-specific datasets using standard metrics, and a user preference modeling module that captures user-defined priorities through structured input. The system supports clustering, classification, and regression tasks, and allows users to generate rankings based on dataset performance, user preferences, or both. Each mode produces a context-aware ranking tailored to its input. In hybrid mode, HybrirankFramework leverages its core fusion mechanism to integrate data-driven performance and user priorities to generate a more selective and user-aligned recommendation. This ranking serves as a decision-support system, enabling users to select the most appropriate algorithm. Hybrirank offers a dual-layered evaluation process that enhances recommendation relevance, bridges the gap between empirical performance and practical needs, and it supports optimal selection guided by both data and priorities.
Pavan Manikanta Raghava Kasturi, Vithya Ganesan, N. Kirubakaran· International journal of com...· 0 citations
Existing scientific text representation methods based on contrastive learning typically adopt a binary classification paradigm of positive and negative samples, which struggles to capture the complex, hierarchical semantic similarity relationships inherent in scientific texts. To address this, we propose SciRep, a novel two-stage ranking distillation framework. In the first stage, we distill knowledge from a large language model to a medium-scale representation model using generated ranking samples; in the second stage, a multi-teacher strategy further transfers fine-grained ranking capability to a lightweight model. Evaluated on a scientific literature semantic embedding benchmark comprising three tasks, SciRep outperforms the strongest baseline by 11.3% in terms of Average Rank and also achieves the highest Mean Reciprocal Rank scores across all three tasks. These results demonstrate that the proposed ranking-aware distillation mechanism significantly enhances scientific text representation quality while maintaining efficient inference, offering a more effective contrastive learning method for domain-specific retrieval tasks.
Bing-Hao Fu, Jun Wang· Applied Sciences· 0 citations
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