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.
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:2602. 07774v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent studies increasingly explore Large Language Models (LLMs) as a new paradigm for recommendation systems due to their scalability and world knowledge.
By Mingfu Liang, Yufei Li, Jay Xu, Kavosh Asadi, Xi Liu, Shuo Gu, Kaushik Rangadurai, Frank Shyu, Shuaiwen Wang, Song Yang, Zhijing Li, Jiang Liu, Mengying Sun, Fei Tian, Xiaohan Wei, Chonglin Sun, Jacob Tao, Shike Mei, Wenlin Chen, Santanu Kolay, Sandeep Pandey, Hamed Firooz, Luke Simon
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:2607. 24995v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Semantic IDs (SIDs) are now a central component of generative recommendation.
By Junting Wang, Xinrui He, Yunzhe Li, Hari Sundaram
arXiv:2605. 04495v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on evidence ranking to determine what information is exposed to the generator, yet existing retrieval and reranking methods primarily estimate query--document relevance.
By Zhipeng Song, Yizhi Zhou, Xiangyu Kong, Jiulong Jiao, Xuezhou Ye, Chunqi Gao, Xueqing Shi, Yu Wang, Yuhang Zhou, Heng Qi
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:2609.22227v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Generative retrieval represents each item by a short Semantic ID and casts recommendation as autoregressive generation of that sequence. Because the...
By Bin Wang, Zhengyu Zhang
arXiv:2609.14565v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM-based sequential recommenders usually cast next-item prediction as text generation, but this interface is poorly matched to full-catalog top-K rank...
By Yuchen Guan, Jiaye Liu, Yifei Han, Zhenxi Zhang, Yixuan Weng, Bin Li
arXiv:2605. 17648v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative recommendation treats next-item prediction as autoregressive item-identifier generation.
By Zaiyi Zheng, Liang Wu, Guanghui Min, Yaochen Zhu, Liangjie Hong, Chen Chen, Jundong Li
arXiv:2510. 06732v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as rerankers in information retrieval, yet their ranking behavior can be steered by small, natural-sounding prompts.
By Tiancheng Xing, Jerry Li, Yixuan Du, Xiyang Hu
arXiv:2607. 25182v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ability to retrieve relevant tables for answering questions is a key task for structured information retrieval.
By Adarsh Singh, Kushal Raj Bhandari, Jianxi Gao, Soham Dan, Vivek Gupta