In this work, we develop a novel reasoning approach to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) in future occupation prediction. In this approach, a reason generator first derives a ``reason'' for a user using his/her past education and career history. The reason summarizes the user's preference and is used as the input of an occupation predictor to recommend the user's next occupation. This two-step occupation prediction approach is, however, non-trivial as LLMs are not aligned with career paths or the unobserved reasons behind each occupation decision. We therefore propose to fine-tune LLMs improving their reasoning and occupation prediction performance. We first derive high-quality oracle reasons, as measured by factuality, coherence and utility criteria, using a LLM-as-a-Judge. These oracle reasons are then used to fine-tune small LLMs to perform reason generation and next occupation prediction. Our extensive experiments show that: (a) our approach effectively enhances LLM's accuracy in next occupation prediction making them comparable to fully supervised methods and outperforming unsupervised methods; (b) a single LLM fine-tuned to perform reason generation and occupation prediction outperforms two LLMs fine-tuned to perform the tasks separately; and (c) the next occupation prediction accuracy depends on the quality of generated reasons. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sarasarahhhhh/job_prediction.
Career paths encode decades of skill acquisition, role transitions, and educational investment, and understanding them at scale underpins workforce planning, labor market policy, and job recommendation. Resumes are a rich source of information about career paths: they contain detailed descriptions of work experience, education, and skills. Yet their unstructured, heterogeneous, and multilingual nature has long prevented large-scale systematic analysis. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), it is now possible to source rich career trajectory data containing temporal and educational signals from unstructured resumes, enabling new opportunities for career-path recommendation. Exploiting this opportunity, we present STEP (Sequential Trajectory of Employment Prediction), a novel career-path recommendation system that leverages temporal and educational signals to predict the next job in a career trajectory. STEP integrates a time-decay Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) cell to model temporal dynamics, Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) conditioned on educational attainment, and attention-based sequence pooling to select relevant features for next job prediction. To improve internal occupation representation for STEP, we introduce ROUTE, a two-stage contrastive procedure that first adapts a multilingual encoder to the career domain via unsupervised denoising autoencoding, then performs supervised contrastive fine-tuning with guided negative selection. We evaluate STEP on four datasets of career trajectories, including an improved version of our publicly available JobHop dataset, and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in next job prediction. The dataset and code are publicly released to support reproducible career-trajectory research.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge. Yet reliably invoking this knowledge for GR remains poorly understood. A key obstacle is that LLM-based GR typically represents items with Semantic IDs (SIDs), disrupting LLMs' natural-language reasoning interface because these tokens are unseen by the LLM during pretraining. Existing approaches address this with expensive multi-stage pipelines that ground SIDs and elicit explicit rationales, but offer limited insight into when and why each stage is necessary. In this work, we systematically decompose explicit reasoning training pipelines for LLM-based GR, revealing three key limitations: weakened world-knowledge verbalization, misalignment between SID and natural-language token embedding spaces, and sensitivity to rationale quality, all of which hurt explicit reasoning performance. To circumvent these issues, we propose PauseRec, a lightweight implicit reasoning paradigm tailored for GR. PauseRec is exceptionally practical, avoiding costly reasoning trace acquisition and reasoning alignment training, leading to a multitude of benefits: (1) it outperforms standard explicit CoT methods by up to 6.22%, (2) it reduces training cost by up to 65% GPU hours, and (3) it speeds up inference by up to 71.3%. These results position PauseRec as a lightweight alternative to explicit rationale generation, enabling more effective and efficient LLM-based GR.
Deployed large reasoning models (LRMs) often behave unexpectedly. Test-time steering controls LRM outputs by intervening on their hidden representations, but it can degrade output quality. We argue that prior steering work implicitly relies on internal features that detect behavior in already generated text. We show that these detection features are poor predictors of future behavioral outcomes, and thus not the natural intervention target. Instead, we train activation probes to predict future behavior likelihoods from intermediate reasoning steps. These probes predict the most likely behavior with 64%-91% accuracy, revealing a separate type of internal prediction features. Building on these prediction features, we introduce a text-level steering method, Future Probe Controlled Generation. FPCG samples multiple candidate sentences and chooses the best one according to a probe predicting the future behavior likelihood. This enables steering with almost no output quality degradation. FPCG also enables steering in several evaluations where activation steering fails. These results show that distinguishing detection and prediction features enables a more nuanced approach to controlling LRM behaviors.
Evgenii Kortukov, Piotr Komorowski, Florian Klein +5