arXiv Machine Learning

Item Representations Matter: Bridging Hard Semantic IDs and Soft Prototype Mixtures for Generative Retrieval

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 24

From Interests to Semantic IDs: Retrieval-Grounded Credit Assignment for Generative Recommendation

The paper introduces a retrieval‑grounded credit‑assignment method for generative recommenders that use Semantic IDs (SIDs). By structuring each autoregressive trace into a history summary, a set of interest hypotheses, and a final SID, a frozen retriever verifies each hypothesis as a catalog query. Rewards are assigned at the hypothesis level when any query retrieves the target within the top‑K, allowing distinct updates for rollouts that share the same SID reward and improving SID recommendation performance on Amazon Reviews datasets.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

From Interests to Semantic IDs: Retrieval-Grounded Credit Assignment for Generative Recommendation

The paper proposes a retrieval‑grounded credit‑assignment method for generative recommenders that use Semantic IDs (SIDs). By structuring each generated trace into a history summary, a set of interest hypotheses, and a final SID, and then verifying each hypothesis with a frozen retriever, the method assigns reward at the hypothesis level rather than only at the final SID. Experiments on Amazon Reviews datasets show consistent improvements in SID recommendation, and an oracle analysis on Video Games data demonstrates that selecting target‑relevant queries among generated interests boosts recall and ranking.

By Mengdan Zhu, Yufan Zhao, Yao Zhao, Sophie Di, Tao Di, Yulan Yan, Sridhar Iyer, Liang Zhao
arXiv AI
Oct 15

Personalized LLM Recommendation with Semantic IDs: Autoregressive Beam Search vs. Multi-Token Prediction

arXiv:2610.15864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale personalization is shifting from embedding-table retrieval to LLM-based recommenders that generate the Semantic ID (SID) of the item to r...

By Sejoon Oh, Fernando Amat Gil, Evan Smothers, Dan Iter, Mark Thornburg, Dawit Mureja Argaw, Sourabh Medapati, Thea Wang, Ria Verma, Qiuling Xu, Harshit Syal, Ehsan Gholami, Moumita Bhattacharya, Ashish Rastogi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

TailSpec-EASE: Knowledge-Graph-Regularized Linear Recommendation for Web Long-Tail Discovery

TailSpec-EASE is a lightweight linear recommender that incorporates a relation‑aware spectral knowledge‑graph prior into a local closed‑form reconstruction objective. By adapting the prior strength to item popularity, it provides stronger semantic guidance for long‑tail items. Across four public benchmarks, it achieves a favorable balance of overall accuracy, long‑tail performance, and training cost, improving NDCG@20 by up to 24% over a no‑KG baseline and training in just 37 seconds on CPU compared to thousands of seconds for GPU‑based KGAT and CPU LightGCN.

By Jianru Shen
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Preserving Item Semantics for Free: Rethinking Token Initialization in LLM-Based Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2608. 07816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative recommendation (GR) leverage large language models (LLMs) as recommender backbones, enabling LLMs to directly generate recommendations conditioned on item-interaction histories.

By Donald Loveland, Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar, Danai Koutra, Neil Shah
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Diagnosing and Mitigating Retrieval Bottlenecks in LLM-Based Cold-Start Recommendation

arXiv:2606. 29947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as rerankers in recommender systems, with the expectation that semantic understanding will help in cold-start and long-tail regimes.

By Zhe Dong (University of Maine at Presque Isle), Fang Qin (Stanford University), Manish Shah (Independent Researcher), Yicheng Wang (Independent Researcher)
arXiv AI
Oct 28

REGER: Modeling inter-item Relations with Semantic IDs for Generative Recommendation

REGER is a unified framework that enhances generative recommendation by explicitly modeling inter-item relations through semantic pretraining, history encoding, and SID generation. It pretrains the model to generate semantic neighbors’ IDs, uses combined global and local attention to capture historical context, and introduces a hierarchical preference decomposition over the SID prefix tree. The approach also distills a discriminative teacher’s full conditional distributions to improve next-token predictions, yielding consistent performance gains on real-world datasets.

By Yuxi Huang, Silin Zhou, Chenhao Wang, Zihan Li, Gangming Guo, Pei Ke, Shen Gao, Shuo Shang