collaborators

15 papers

cs.IR2026

GenRec: An LLM-Backed Recommendation Ranker at Netflix

Ying Li, Shradha Sehgal, Arjun Rao +3

Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping recommender systems by enabling richer modeling of users, content, and context directly in natural language. At Netflix, we are exploring…

cs.AI2026

CausalFlip: A Benchmark for LLM Causal Judgment Beyond Semantic Matching

Yuzhe Wang, Yaochen Zhu, Jundong Li

As large language models (LLMs) witness increasing deployment in complex, high-stakes decision-making scenarios, it becomes imperative to ground their reasoning in causality rather…

cs.IR2026

Mult-DPO: Multinomial Direct Preference Optimization for Recommender Systems

Yaochen Zhu, Harald Steck, James McInerney +4

Direct preference optimization (DPO) is a simple and effective alignment strategy for large language models (LLMs) based on pairwise preferences. In recommender systems, however, u…

cs.CL2026

IAPO: Information-Aware Policy Optimization for Token-Efficient Reasoning

Yinhan He, Yaochen Zhu, Mingjia Shi +5

Large language models increasingly rely on long chains of thought to improve accuracy, yet such gains come with substantial inference-time costs. We revisit token-efficient post-tr…

cs.AI2026

SAPO: Step-Aligned Policy Optimization for Reasoning-Based Generative Recommendation

Zaiyi Zheng, Guanghui Min, Yaochen Zhu +4

Generative recommendation treats next-item prediction as autoregressive item-identifier generation. Specifically, items are encoded as semantic identifiers (SIDs), which are short…

cs.CV2026

Saliency-Aware Multi-Route Thinking: Revisiting Vision-Language Reasoning

Mingjia Shi, Yinhan He, Yaochen Zhu +1

Vision-language models (VLMs) aim to reason by jointly leveraging visual and textual modalities. While allocating additional inference-time computation has proven effective for lar…