Papers by Weinan Gan
From ID to LLM: Rethinking Representation Learning for Recommendation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies indicate a fundamental incompatibility between ID representations and language model (LM) representations as they capture behavioral and semantic spaces respectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a Profile-then-Embedding framework for recommendation that integrates semantic user and item profiles and a Personalized Embedded stage to encode these profiles into task-aligned recommendation embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant gains across three benchmark datasets, including cold-start and long-tail scenarios. |
RecBase: Generative Foundation Model Pretraining for Zero-Shot Recommendation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Sashuai Zhou, Weinan Gan, Qijiong Liu, Ke Lei, Jieming Zhu, Hai Huang, Yan Xia, Ruiming Tang, Zhenhua Dong, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for addressing item-level user interests are lacking in cross-domain generalization . RecBase model is domain-agnostic and can be used to enhance recommender systems' effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-agnostic foundational model pretrained with a recommendation-oriented objective that leverages a large-scale, heterogeneous, cross-domain corpus with unified textual representations and feature mappings to enhance cross- domain generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches or surpasses baselines in zero-shot and cross-domain recommendation tasks on eight real-world datasets. |
Instruction-Tuning Data Synthesis from Scratch via Web Reconstruction (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Chuhan Wu, Xinyi Dai, Yan Xu, Weinan Gan, Yasheng Wang, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Ruiming Tang, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating and curating high-quality instruction-tuning data rely heavily on the quality of seed data or strong assumptions about the structure and content of web documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully automated framework for synthesizing high-quality instruction-tuning (IT) data directly from raw web documents with minimal assumptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 16.65% across four instruction-following benchmarks. |