February 2026

arXiv:2602.07208v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To tackle cold-start and data sparsity issues in recommender systems, numerous multimodal, sequential, and contrastive techniques have been proposed. While these augmentations can boost recommendation performance, they tend to add noise and disrupt useful semantics. To address this, we propose MuSICRec (Multimodal Sequence-Item Contrastive Recommender), a multi-view graph-based recommender that combines collaborative, sequential, and multimodal signals. We build a sequence-item (SI) view by attention pooling over the user’s interacted items to form sequence […]

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arXiv:2602.07207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a novel recommender framework, MuSTRec (Multimodal and Sequential Transformer-based Recommendation), that unifies multimodal and sequential recommendation paradigms. MuSTRec captures cross-item similarities and collaborative filtering signals, by building item-item graphs from extracted text and visual features. A frequency-based self-attention module additionally captures the short- and long-term user preferences. Across multiple Amazon datasets, MuSTRec demonstrates superior performance (up to 33.5% improvement) over multimodal and sequential state-of-the-art baselines. Finally, we detail some interesting facets […]

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arXiv:2602.07206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Softmax Loss (SL) is being increasingly adopted for recommender systems (RS) as it has demonstrated better performance, robustness and fairness. Yet in implicit-feedback, a single global temperature and equal treatment of uniformly sampled negatives can lead to brittle training, because sampled sets may contain varying degrees of relevant or informative competitors. The optimal loss sharpness for a user-item pair with a particular set of negatives, can be suboptimal or destabilising for another with […]

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arXiv:2602.07203v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structural Causal Models (SCM) are a powerful framework for describing complicated dynamics across the natural sciences. A particularly elegant way of interpreting SCMs is do-Shapley, a game-theoretic method of quantifying the average effect of $d$ variables across exponentially many interventions. Like Shapley values, computing do-Shapley values generally requires evaluating exponentially many terms. The foundation of our work is a reformulation of do-Shapley values in terms of the irreducible sets of the underlying SCM. […]

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arXiv:2602.07202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved tremendous success on a range of challenging tasks. However, safety concerns remain when these methods are deployed on real-world applications, necessitating risk-aware agents. A common utility for learning such risk-aware agents is the entropic risk measure, but current policy gradient methods optimizing this measure must perform high-variance and numerically unstable updates. As a result, existing risk-sensitive model-free approaches are limited to simple tasks and tabular […]

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arXiv:2602.07200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are energy-efficient counterparts of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with high biological plausibility, as information is transmitted through temporal spiking patterns. The core element of an SNN is the spiking neuron, which converts input data into spikes following the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neuron model. This model includes several important hyperparameters, such as the membrane potential threshold and membrane time constant. Both the DNNs and SNNs have proven to be exploitable […]

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arXiv:2602.07198v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conditioning is crucial for stable training of full-head 3D GANs. Without any conditioning signal, the model suffers from severe mode collapse, making it impractical to training. However, a series of previous full-head 3D GANs conventionally choose the view angle as the conditioning input, which leads to a bias in the learned 3D full-head space along the conditional view direction. This is evident in the significant differences in generation quality and diversity between the […]

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arXiv:2602.07197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Due to the nature of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) applications, black-box defenses are more practical than white-box methods, yet existing purification techniques suffer from key limitations: a lack of justification for specific transformations, dataset dependency, high computational overhead, and a neglect of frequency-domain transformations. This paper conducts a preliminary study on various image transformations, identifying down-upscaling as the most effective backdoor trigger […]

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arXiv:2602.07195v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interactive computational notebooks (e.g., Jupyter notebooks) are widely used in machine learning engineering (MLE) to program and share end-to-end pipelines, from data preparation to model training and evaluation. However, environment erosion-the rapid evolution of hardware and software ecosystems for machine learning-has rendered many published MLE notebooks non-reproducible in contemporary environments, hindering code reuse and scientific progress. To quantify this gap, we study 12,720 notebooks mined from 79 popular Kaggle competitions: only 35.4% remain […]

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arXiv:2602.07193v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Millions of users form emotional attachments to AI companions like Character.AI, Replika, and ChatGPT. When these relationships end through model updates, safety interventions, or platform shutdowns, users receive no closure, reporting grief comparable to human loss. As regulations mandate protections for vulnerable users, discontinuation events will accelerate, yet no platform has implemented deliberate end-of-“life” design. Through grounded theory analysis of AI companion communities, we find that discontinuation is a sense-making process shaped by […]

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