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Bundle generation aims to provide a bundle of items for the user, and has been widely studied and applied on online service platforms. Existing bundle generation methods mainly utilized user's preference from historical interactions in common recommendation paradigm, and ignored the potential textual query which is user's current explicit intention. There can be a scenario in which a user proactively queries a bundle with some natural language description, the system should be able to generate a bundle that exactly matches the user's intention through the user's query and preferences. In this work, we define this user-friendly scenario as Query-based Bundle Generation task and propose a novel framework Text2Bundle that leverages both the user's short-term interests from the query and the user's long-term preferences from the historical interactions. Our framework consists of three modules: (1) a query interest extractor that mines the user's fine-grained interests from the query; (2) a unified state encoder that learns the current bundle context state and the user's preferences based on historical interaction and current query; and (3) a bundle generator that generates personalized and complementary bundles using a reinforcement learning with specifically designed rewards. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) could acquire dynamic user preferences towards desired items through multi-round interactive dialogue. Previous CRS mainly focuses on the single conversation (subsession) that user quits after a successful recommendation, neglecting the common scenario where user has multiple conversations (multi-subsession) over a short period. Therefore, we propose a novel conversational recommendation scenario named Multi-Subsession Multi-round Conversational Recommendation (MSMCR), where user would still resort to CRS after several subsessions and might preserve vague interests, and system would proactively ask attributes to activate user interests in the current subsession. To fill the gap in this new CRS scenario, we devise a novel framework called Multi-Subsession Conversational Recommender with Activation Attributes (MSCAA). Specifically, we first develop a context-aware recommendation module, comprehensively modeling user interests from historical interactions, previous subsessions, and feedback in the current subsession. Furthermore, an attribute selection policy module is proposed to learn a flexible strategy for asking appropriate attributes to elicit user interests. Finally, we design a conversation policy module to manage the above two modules to decide actions between asking and recommending. Extensive experiments on four datasets verify the effectiveness of our MSCAA framework for the MSMCR setting.

Violation of the $U(1)$ axial symmetry in QCD is stricter than the chiral $SU(2)$ breaking, simply because of the presence of the quantum axial anomaly. If the QCD gauge coupling is sent to zero, the strength of the $U(1)$ axial breaking coincides with that of the chiral $SU(2)$ breaking, which we shall in short call an axial-chiral coincidence. This coincidence is trivial since QCD then becomes a non-interacting theory. Actually, there exists another limit in the QCD parameter space, where an axial-chiral coincidence occurs even with nonzero QCD gauge coupling, that can be dubbed a nontrivial coincidence: it is the case with the massive light quarks $(m_l\neq 0)$ and the massless strange quark ($m_s=0$), due to the flavor-singlet nature of the topological susceptibility. This coincidence is robust and tied to the anomalous chiral Ward-Takahashi identity, which is operative even at hot QCD. This implies that the chiral $SU(2)$ symmetry is restored simultaneously with the $U(1)$ axial symmetry at high temperatures. This simultaneous restoration is independent of $m_l (\neq 0)$, hence is irrespective to the order of the chiral phase transition. In this paper, we discuss how the real-life QCD can be evolved from the nontrivial chiral-axial coincidence limit, by working on a Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with the $U(1)$ axial anomaly contribution properly incorporated. It is shown that at high temperatures the large differences between the restorations of the chiral $SU(2)$ symmetry and the $U(1)$ axial symmetry for two light quarks and a sufficiently large current mass for the strange quark is induced by a significant interference of the topological susceptibility. Thus the deviation from the nontrivial coincidence, which is monitored by the strange quark mass controlling the topological susceptibility, provides a new way of understanding the chiral $SU(2)$ and $U(1)$ axial breaking in QCD., Comment: 23 pages, 11 figures, some references added

Session-based recommendation (SBR) is proposed to recommend items within short sessions given that user profiles are invisible in various scenarios nowadays, such as e-commerce and short video recommendation. There is a common scenario that user specifies a target category of items as a global filter, however previous SBR settings mainly consider the item sequence and overlook the rich target category information. Therefore, we define a new task called Category-aware Session-Based Recommendation (CSBR), focusing on the above scenario, in which the user-specified category can be efficiently utilized by the recommendation system. To address the challenges of the proposed task, we develop a novel method called Intention Adaptive Graph Neural Network (IAGNN), which takes advantage of relationship between items and their categories to achieve an accurate recommendation result. Specifically, we construct a category-aware graph with both item and category nodes to represent the complex transition information in the session. An intention-adaptive graph neural network on the category-aware graph is utilized to capture user intention by transferring the historical interaction information to the user-specified category domain. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets are conducted to show our IAGNN outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in the new task.

We find that a big gap between indicators for the breaking strengths of the global chiral SU(2) and U(1) axial symmetries in QCD of the Standard Model (SM) can be interpreted as a new fine-tuning problem. This may thus imply calling for a class of Beyond the SM, which turns out to favor having a new chiral symmetry and the associated massless new quark insensitive to the chiral SU(2) symmetry for the lightest up and down quarks, so that the fine-tuning is relaxed. Our statistical estimate shows that QCD of the SM is by more than 300 standard deviations off the desired parameter space, which is free from the fine-tuning, and the significance will be greater as the lattice measurements on the QCD hadron observables get more accurate. As one viable candidate, we introduce a dark QCD model with massless new quarks, which can survive current experimental, cosmological, and astrophysical limits, and also leave various phenomenological and cosmological consequences, to be probed in the future. This is a new indication from QCD, which gives a new avenue to deeper understand QCD, and provides a new guideline to consider going beyond the SM., Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures; analysis updated, several discussions and references added; claims further refined

Any axionlike particle (ALP) intrinsically possesses flavorful couplings to the standard model (SM) fermions arising as a consequence of the right-handed flavor rotation within the SM. In this paper we discuss this intrinsically flavored ALP, and explore the correlation of a minimal set of the couplings in a view of coherence in flavor physics observables. We focus particularly on the tau-lepton flavor violation (LFV). The ALP is assumed to be tau-philic on a current-eigenstate basis, a la Pecci-Quinn. The ALP has the intrinsic flavorful coupling structure for fermions, which allows coupling also to muon and electron only in a right-handed specific manner. Several LFV processes are generated including radiative tau decays and also anomalous magnetic moments of electron and muon. We first pay attention to two separated limits: electron scenario with the ALP coupled to tau which mixes only with right-handed electron, and muon scenario as the muonic counterpart of the electron scenario. It turns out that those scenarios are highly constrained by experimental limits, to require a mu or electron - tau flipped feature in the mass eigenbasis when coupled to the ALP. We then examine a hybrid scenario, and find a fully viable parameter space on the ALP mass-photon coupling plane, which limits the ALP mass to be (1.7 - 10) GeV and the ALP decay constant $f_a$ to be (12.8 - 67.9) GeV. We find that the same-sign multilepton signal at Belle II is a smoking-gun to probe the present ALP signal, and the polarization asymmetry in LFV radiative $\tau$ decay is a punchline, which definitely predicts preference of the right-handed polarization, in sharp contrast to the SM plus massive Dirac neutrinos having the highly left-handed preference, and also other light-new physics candidates. Possible model-building to underlie the present third-generation specific ALP is also briefly addressed., Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures; major revision

We find that the chiral phase transition (chiral crossover) in QCD at physical point is triggered by big imbalance among three fundamental quantities essential for the QCD vacuum structure: susceptibility functions for the chiral symmetry, axial symmetry, and the topological charge. The balance, dobbed the QCD trilemma, is unavoidably violated when one of the magnitudes among them is highly dominated, or suppressed. Based on a three-flavor Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model, we explicitly evaluate the amount of violation of the QCD trilemma at physical point, and show that the violation takes place not only at vacuum, but even in a whole temperature regime including the chiral crossover epoch. This work confirms and extends the suggestion recently reported from lattice QCD with 2 flavors on dominance of the axial and topological susceptibilities left in the chiral susceptibility at high temperatures. It turns out that the imbalance is essentially due to the flavor symmetry violation of the lightest three flavors, and the flavor breaking specifically brings enhancement of the axial anomaly contribution in the chiral order parameter, while the the strength of the axial breaking and the transition rate of the topological charge are fairly insensitive to the flavor symmetry. The violation of QCD trilemma and its flavor dependence can be tested by lattice simulations with 2 + 1 flavors in the future, and would also give a new guiding principle to explore the flavor dependence of the chiral phase transition, such as the Columbia plot, including possible extension with external fields., Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures; version published in Phys.Rev.D