The paper examines how new vocabulary tokens are added to language models for generative recommendation tasks. It shows that the common practice of initializing these tokens as the mean of existing embeddings collapses them into a degenerate subspace, hindering fine‑tuning. The authors propose Grounded Token Initialization (GTI), which places new tokens at semantically meaningful positions in the pretrained embedding space using linguistic supervision, and demonstrate that GTI outperforms mean initialization and other adaptation methods across several benchmarks.
By Daiwei Chen, Zhoutong Fu, Chengming Jiang, Haichao Zhang, Ran Zhou, Tan Wang, Chunnan Yao, Guoyao Li, Rui Cai, Yihan Cao, Ruijie Jiang, Fedor Borisyuk, Jianqiang Shen, Jingwei Wu, Ramya Korlakai Vinayak
arXiv:2607. 25209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation commonly represents items using fixed-length semantic identifiers (SIDs) constructed through clustering and quantization.
By Shutong Qiao, Wei Yuan, Tong Chen, Hao Wang, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Hongzhi Yin
arXiv:2509. 25522v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advancements in generative models have allowed the emergence of a promising paradigm for recommender systems (RS), known as Generative Recommendation (GR), which tries to unify rich item semantics and collaborative filtering signals.
By Jingzhe Liu, Liam Collins, Jiliang Tang, Tong Zhao, Neil Shah, Clark Mingxuan Ju
arXiv:2511.22707v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: In web environments, user preferences are often refined progressively as users move from browsing broad categories to exploring specific item...
By Tianxin Wei, Xuying Ning, Xuxing Chen, Ruizhong Qiu, Yupeng Hou, Yan Xie, Shuang Yang, Zhigang Hua, Jingrui He
arXiv:2606. 17276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation (GR) has emerged as a promising direction for recommender systems.
By Sunwoo Kim, Sunkyung Lee, Clark Mingxuan Ju, Donald Loveland, Bhuvesh Kumar, Kijung Shin, Neil Shah, Liam Collins
arXiv:2606. 07688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation formulates next-item prediction as autoregressive generation over semantic ID (SID) sequences derived from users' historical interactions, making modern recommender systems structurally similar to large language models (LLMs).
By Ziheng Chen, Jiali Cheng, Zezhong Fan, Hadi Amiri, Diyuan Wu, Gabriele Tolomei, Yang Zhang
arXiv:2606. 11023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential recommendation aims to predict users' next interaction with items by analyzing their historical behavior.
By Yifan Li, Jiahong Liu, Xinni Zhang, Hao Chen, Yankai Chen, Wenhao Yu, Jianting Chen, Irwin King
arXiv:2607. 25216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic ID-based generative recommendation tokenizes each item into a sequence of discrete semantic IDs and predicts the next item by generating semantic IDs.
By Ziyu Zheng, Zhengshun Du, Yaming Yang, Bin Tong, Guan Wang, Meng Yan, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao
arXiv:2608. 11980v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic-ID generative recommenders represent each item as a short sequence of discrete semantic tokens and predict the next item by autoregressively generating this token sequence.
By Kangning Zhang, Haotian Fang, Xukun Luo, Hao Yin, Yang Gao, Peng Yan, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu
arXiv:2606. 14142v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge.
By Yinhan He, Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar, Jundong Li, Neil Shah, Donald Loveland
Sequential recommendation aims to predict users' next interaction with items by analyzing their historical behavior. However, the limited quality of item representations remains a critical bottleneck.
arXiv:2603. 23183v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative recommendation have leveraged pretrained LLMs by formulating sequential recommendation as autoregressive generation over a unified token space comprising language tokens and itemic identifiers, where each item is represented by a compact sequence of discrete tokens, namely Semantic IDs (SIDs).
By Yingzhi He, Yan Sun, Junfei Tan, Yuxin Chen, Xiaoyu Kong, Chunxu Shen, Xiang Wang, An Zhang, Tat-Seng Chua