Zihao Cheng, Yingyu Shan, Hongru Wang +6cs.CL cs.AI
Travel planning agents assist users in generating personalized travel plans by modeling their individual preferences. Existing agents either rely on explicit user instructions or engage in multi-turn clarification to elicit user preferences. However, both approaches overlook the rich behavioral signals latent in users' past behaviors, which implicitly encode their preferences. This over-reliance on active user input increases interaction burden and limits plan personalization. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new task, Behavior-Aware Travel Planning, which infers user preferences directly from past behaviors and generates personalized travel plans. To facilitate research on this task, we introduce Behavior2Trip, a benchmark constructed from one of the largest Chinese online travel platforms, comprising 11,400 instances. Each instance represents an average of 39.8 past user behaviors spanning 14 attributes across 5 preference dimensions. We further propose B2T-Agent, a reinforcement learning-based agent that leverages user behavior trajectories, interacts with external tools for preference-aligned retrieval, and maintains an internal memory module. Experiments on Behavior2Trip show that GPT-4.1 achieves a full-constraint pass rate of only 0.5\% on the hardest tasks, while B2T-Agent built upon Qwen3-8B outperforms all baselines, highlighting the substantial challenge of this task. Moreover, Qwen3-8B trained with B2T-Agent also outperforms GPT-4.1 on the TravelPlanner benchmark, demonstrating strong generalization. Code and data are available at https://github.com/BUAA-IRIP-LLM/Behavior2Trip
Pengfei Jia, Jingjian Wang, Jingmao Li +2cs.IR cs.AI
Positional encoding is a fundamental component of Transformer-based generative recommendation models, where user histories are modeled as autoregressive item sequences. Most positional encoding methods are inherited from natural language processing and mainly represent discrete item order. However, recommendation sequences go beyond ordered lists, as timestamps and temporal effects also shape item relations. Our work is motivated by a real-world food delivery and instant retail recommendation system, where user behavior exhibits multi-level temporal regularities, including recency effects, meal-time peaks, weekday-weekend shifts, and promotion-driven traffic bursts. Existing methods partially address this issue through timestamp features, interval embeddings, decay functions, or attention biases, but they usually inject heterogeneous temporal signals through a unified representation or a single modeling pathway, making it difficult to distinguish broad temporal dynamics from local order cues. To address this limitation, we propose Decoupled Temporal Encoding, a lightweight framework for generative recommendation. DTE separates temporal dynamics from order information through two complementary modules: a personalized macro-temporal module that injects compact temporal primitives into item embeddings, and a time-gated micro-sequential module that introduces relative-order bias only when interactions are temporally dense. DTE is also parameter-efficient and deployment-friendly, allowing easy integration into existing systems.
Existing personalized LLM benchmarks primarily rely on textual personas or isolated behavioral signals, providing limited evaluation of cross-domain behavioral personalization, where responses must be grounded in heterogeneous daily-life activities. To address this gap, we introduce LUNAR, the first benchmark for evaluating how LLMs personalize responses from longitudinal app interaction histories across universal daily-life domains, including clothing, food, housing, and mobility. To support scalable benchmark construction while mitigating data sparsity and privacy concerns, LUNAR uses a multi-stage coarse-to-fine synthesis pipeline grounded in real-world behavioral patterns. Fidelity analyses show closer alignment with real behavioral distributions than other synthetic benchmarks. Experiments on 19 mainstream LLMs show that access to behavioral logs is necessary but not sufficient for deep personalization: neither more context nor larger models guarantees better performance; effective personalization depends on selecting and integrating relevant evidence across domains. Direct retrieval of fine-grained behavioral records consistently outperforms compressed memory, while stronger personalization can come at the cost of privacy protection. These findings identify evidence selection, cross-domain integration, and privacy control as key challenges for personalized LLMs.
Utility data (e.g., electricity, water, and gas consumption), collected by ubiquitous sensors and embedded devices, often contains substantial missing values due to various factors such as device failures and data transmission issues. The data missingness can severely impact utility billing accuracy, hinder demand forecasting, and disrupt efficient utility supply management. As a result, utility data imputation has attracted much interest from both industry and academia. While many studies have attempted to address this issue, most of them rely on aggregated datasets for training, overlooking rich user behavior information, which could provide valuable insights for more accurate imputation. However, learning comprehensive user behavior from long-term, diverse, and incomplete utility data remains a significant challenge. Moreover, leveraging user behavior information to guide imputation is nontrivial due to the indirect nature of the correlations. To address these challenges, we propose MBDiff, a Multi-view Behavior-aware Diffusion Model for Probabilistic Utility Data Imputation. MBDiff incorporates two key technical components: (i) a multi-view User Behavior Extraction module that learns comprehensive user behavior from multiple perspectives, including global, local, and instance-level views; and (ii) a behavior-aware conditional diffusion model consisting of a reference selection module and a conditional attentional denoising network to impute utility data in a computationally efficient manner. We implement and evaluate MBDiff by collaborating with one of the largest municipal utility providers in Florida. Experimental results demonstrate our proposed MBDiff effectively outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, e.g., it improves 7.04% and 29.1% on the electricity and water usage datasets for block missingness imputation, respectively.
Diego Manya, Ethan I. Thorpe, Ji Zhang +4cs.CY cs.AI
The energy demand growth and environmental impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) have generated substantial interest in supplying sufficient low-cost electricity for AI-driven data center development. Research on the ability of demand-side management to address these challenges has been more limited. Shifting the amount or timing of demand from retail, corporate, and other organizational behaviors is a plausible option but only if changes in demand-related behavior have important effects on the envi- ronmental and electricity effects of AI. This article tests four retail (i.e., consumer) user behaviors with high behavioral plasticity to assess their technical abatement potential. The research concludes that non- reasoning models provide sufficient quality while consuming close to one-twentieth of energy compared to reasoning models, saving an amount equal to the annual electricity requirement of at least 141,000 US households under daily usage assumptions. Simple prompt modifications can yield additional reduc- tions in energy consumption by up to 65% using non-reasoning models. Specifically, the practice that maintains the highest degree of similarity with the baseline reduces electricity demand in the range of 4 to 35%, an amount equal to the annual electricity requirement of up to 7,200 US households. Although AI advancements make precise estimates of environmental and electricity impacts difficult to assess, the results confirm that certain minimally intrusive best practices aimed at the majority of users can reduce the energy and environmental burdens imposed by AI.
Rachith Aiyappa, Ishita Khan, Chester Palen-Michel +4cs.IR cs.AI
Understanding user intent is fundamental to delivering relevant search results in e-commerce. However, substantial fraction of real-world queries are under-specified (e.g., "watch" or "shirt"), lacking explicit attributes such as gender or age group. This ambiguity poses a significant challenge for query intent detection models in e-commerce search systems, which must accurately infer latent user intent (e.g., age, gender) to support effective downstream retrieval. We introduce IntentTune, a framework for resolving ambiguous or under-specified query intents by leveraging either (1) user-specific behavioral signals including search history, browsing activity, and profile attributes or (2) population-level demand patterns aggregated across all users. Through experiments on real-world e-commerce data, we first demonstrate that population-level demand patterns alone are insufficient to reliably infer intent in under-specified queries. We then demonstrate that user-specific behavioral signals -- particularly prior search queries -- outperform both population-level statistics and static profile information for inferring gender, age group, product category, and size intent from underspecified queries.
With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) platforms, users increasingly show cross-platform usage intentions. Existing research focuses on adoption and usage intentions in single-platform AIGC contexts. A theoretical gap still exists in studies on cross-platform usage. This paper constructs and verifies a three-stage multiple mediation model based on the personality trait-perception-behavioral response framework. The model integrates the optimum stimulation level (OSL) theory, complementarity theory, and perceived value theory, and it sets social influence and use experience as control variables to examine users' multi-homing intention. The results show that: (a) OSL significantly enhances users' perceived complementarity; (b) perceived complementarity positively affects perceived epistemic value; (c) perceived epistemic value significantly and positively predicts multi-homing intention; (d) OSL influences multi-homing intention through a chain mediation path of perceived complementarity and perceived epistemic value; and (e) social influence has a significant positive effect on multi-homing intention, while the effect of use experience is not significant.
Neel Gupta, Maria Antoniak, Melanie Walshcs.CL cs.AI cs.CY
Some professional authors are beginning to use AI tools to help produce their fiction writing. Are readers using AI to generate fiction, too? This paper examines how large language models are reshaping the production and consumption of fiction by enabling new forms of participation in narrative generation. Drawing on over 500,000 anonymized, English-language ChatGPT-user conversations (arXiv:2405.01470), we find that more than one third of the conversations involve some form of fiction generation -- including original stories, roleplay, fanfiction, and erotica. This AI-generated fiction is notably dominated by power users. We identify common fiction generation patterns and profiles among these users, including what we call "infinite story demanders," who repeatedly request and revise variations of the same or similar narratives over extended periods of time. We show that users especially gravitate toward fanfiction and erotica, and that they are broadly drawn to generic forms, repetition, immediacy, and niche combinations of story elements. Our findings motivate two theoretical provocations. First, we argue that AI technologies may lead to a shift in the conventional relationship between the author and reader, potentially producing what we call a "solipsistic reader-writer," who both generates and consumes fiction within a closed conversational loop, interacting with a machine rather than a human other. Second, we note that LLMs enable interactivity, play, and permutation in ways that are seemingly pleasurable for users, raising questions about where AI will fit into contemporary storytelling and entertainment ecosystems. We situate these developments within broader transformations in literature and media, including self-publishing, fanfiction, and pornography, and suggest that AI-generated fiction shares structural affinities with on-demand, personalized, and repetitive cultural forms.
Sequential or time-stamped interaction logs provide objective records of digital application usage, yet their granularity and noise often obscure meaningful insights into people's work. Such insights are essential for improving digital products in ways grounded in real-world user interactions. Prior research has applied deep learning models to cluster user actions into high-level activities, but these approaches are highly sensitive to noise and struggle to generalize across applications. To address this limitation, we introduce WorkflowView, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to abstract low-level action sequences into high-level activities. We establish the effectiveness and generality of our approach across three distinct, challenging sequential tasks and diverse domains: (a) zero-shot task description reconstruction from browser logs (achieving high semantic similarity, $μ_{sim} = 0.91$), (b) few-shot student dropout prediction using MOOC interaction logs (reaching weighted $F_1 = 0.90$ with only five few-shot examples), and (c) anonymized, privacy-preserving analysis of AI tool integration within document workflows in Microsoft Word. Our work demonstrates that LLM-based abstraction is a robust and efficient path forward for transforming low-level behavioral data into high-level, interpretable, and actionable insights. We also discuss practical considerations for deploying LLM-based inferences within logging infrastructures, including computational efficiency and user privacy.
Foundation models are increasingly trained on sequences of user actions in recommendation, payments, fraud, and commerce, but these models still lack the kind of compute calibration that scaling laws provide for language models. We study a common two-part behavioral-model architecture: a feature-based event embedder maps each multi-modal item to a vector, and a decoder-only transformer predicts the next event from the resulting sequence. Across roughly 600 runs on real interaction data, spanning $10^{15}$-$10^{19}$ training FLOPs, we jointly vary four deployment-relevant axes: the two-part parameter split, critical batch size, model/data allocation, and the number of sampled negatives used after freezing the embedder. A small embedder ($s^{\star}\!\approx\!2\%$ of parameters) is compute-optimal at every budget we test because embedder parameters are both more expensive per step and exposed to far more repeated items than contextualizer parameters. Compute-optimal training is data-heavy relative to text at low compute, but its $D/N$ ratio moves toward the Chinchilla heuristic as compute increases. The sampled training objective and deployed ranking metrics disagree in ways that themselves scale: critical batch size, optimal negative count after freezing, and the agreement between loss and ranking quality all shift with compute and with the chosen evaluation metric. For negative sampling, larger budgets increasingly prefer more negatives; by $10^{19}$ FLOPs the active constraint is candidate-axis memory rather than FLOPs. In behavioral foundation models, the evaluation metric is therefore part of the scaling law: changing it can change the compute-optimal recipe.
How much does a user's skill with AI shape what AI actually delivers for them? This question is critical for users, AI product builders, and society at large, but it remains underexplored. Using a richly annotated sample of 27K transcripts from WildChat-4.8M, we show that fluent users take on more complex tasks than novices and adopt a fundamentally different interactional mode: they iterate collaboratively with the AI, refining goals and critically assessing outputs, whereas novices take a passive stance. These differences lead to a paradox of AI fluency: fluent users experience more failures than novices -- but their failures tend to be visible (a direct consequence of their engagement), they are more likely to lead to partial recovery, and they occur alongside greater success on complex tasks. Novices, by contrast, more often experience invisible failures: conversations that appear to end successfully but in fact miss the mark. Taken together, these results reframe what success with AI depends on. Individuals should adopt a stance of active engagement rather than passive acceptance. AI product builders should recognize that they are designing not just model behavior but user behavior; encouraging deep engagement, rather than friction-free experiences, will lead to more success overall. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/bigspinai/bigspin-fluency-outcomes
With the rapid development of the Internet, users have increasingly higher expectations for the recommendation accuracy of online content consumption platforms. However, short videos often contain diverse segments, and users may not hold the same attitude toward all of them. Traditional binary-classification recommendation models, which treat a video as a single holistic entity, face limitations in accurately capturing such nuanced preferences. Considering that user consumption is a temporal process, this paper demonstrates that the timing of user actions can represent diverse intentions through statistical analysis and examination of action patterns. Based on this insight, we propose a novel modeling paradigm: Action-Aware Generative Sequence Network (A2Gen), which refines user actions along the temporal dimension and chains them into sequences for unified processing and prediction. First, we introduce the Context-aware Attention Module (CAM) to model action sequences enriched with item-specific contextual features. Building upon this, we develop the Hierarchical Sequence Encoder (HSE) to learn temporal action patterns from users' historical actions. Finally, through leveraging CAM, we design a module for action sequence generation: the Action-seq Autoregressive Generator (AAG). Extensive offline experiments on the Kuaishou's dataset and the Tmall public dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model. Furthermore, through large-scale online A/B testing deployed on Kuaishou's platform, our model achieves significant improvements over baseline methods in multi-task prediction by leveraging sequential information. Specifically, it yields increases of 0.34% in user watch time, 8.1% in interaction rate, and 0.162% in overall user retention (LifeTime-7), leading to successful deployment across all traffic, serving over 400 million users every day.