arXiv AI

TAAL: Mitigating Early Beam Pruning in Generative Recommendation via Temporal Autoregressive Alignment

arXiv AI
Aug 24

Difficulty-Aware Semantic-ID Optimization for Generative Recommendation

The paper introduces Difficulty‑Aware Semantic‑ID Optimization (DASO), a post‑training method for generative recommendation that improves tree‑structured item ranking. DASO profiles rollout groups by prefix‑match depth, reallocates a portion of candidates to prefix‑guided completions, and uses a SID‑prefix reward with an auxiliary SFT anchor to address target‑missing failures. On public benchmarks, DASO outperforms MiniOneRec‑style GRPO on 11 of 12 metrics and achieves the best results on 9 of 12 metrics, also improving level‑wise recall on an internal recommendation task.

By Xin Yu, Stephen Li, Sina Aghaei, Zifan Zhu, Jiamu Bai, Guanjie Huang, Bo Peng, Yiyao Liu, Lingzhou Xue
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
Sep 4

WIDE: Wildcard Inference with Dynamic Expansion for Cross-Modal Generative Retrieval

WIDE: Wildcard Inference with Dynamic Expansion for Cross-Modal Generative Retrieval proposes a new approach to address information asymmetry in cross-modal retrieval. The method introduces Adaptive Entropy Thresholding to calibrate uncertainty, Asymmetry-aware Wildcard Decoding to emit wildcards instead of forced identifiers, and Blind-Spot Re-ranking to evaluate expanded candidates. Experiments on the M-BEIR benchmark show that WIDE outperforms existing generative retrieval methods by reducing forced hallucination while keeping index structures compact.

By Teng Guo, Xin Wang, Jiayou Xu, Keying Zhou, Jifeng Shen, Haoxin Ruan
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

WIDE: Wildcard Inference with Dynamic Expansion for Cross-Modal Generative Retrieval

The paper introduces WIDE, a method for cross‑modal generative retrieval that tackles information asymmetry between text queries and visual candidates. WIDE uses Adaptive Entropy Thresholding to set uncertainty limits, Asymmetry‑aware Wildcard Decoding to emit wildcards where the model lacks fine‑grained detail, and Blind‑Spot Re‑ranking to score an expanded candidate set with both discrete confidence and continuous similarity. Experiments on the M‑BEIR benchmark show that WIDE reduces forced hallucination and outperforms existing generative retrieval approaches while keeping index structures compact.

arXiv AI
Sep 1

Preference Shapes Relevance: Cross-component Hierarchical Semantic Alignment for Personalized Generative Retrieval

The paper introduces CHAP, a personalized generative retrieval framework that aligns query semantics with item representations through a hierarchical semantic alignment module and models user behavior using both discrete Semantic IDs and continuous representations. It also proposes a Residual Cascading Generation mechanism to reduce inference latency by limiting the Transformer decoder to a single pass. Experiments on multiple datasets and online A/B tests show that CHAP outperforms existing methods, demonstrating its practical value.

By Gaoming Zhang, Angqing Jiang, Jianchun Song, Kena Qi, Dayao Chen, Wei Lin, Defu Lian
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

EPIC: Explicit Posterior Item Conditioning for Semantic ID Diffusion Recommendation

EPIC: Explicit Posterior Item Conditioning for Semantic ID Diffusion Recommendation proposes a method that adds explicit item-level competition into the denoising process of Semantic ID (SID) generative recommendation. The approach builds a personalized posterior over feasible candidate items based on the current generation context and the user's recent interactions, then projects this distribution back to unresolved SID positions to guide subsequent token decisions. Experiments on four Amazon benchmarks show consistent improvements over strong baselines, with diagnostic analyses indicating that the gains stem from personalized transition evidence that preserves promising item hypotheses during denoising.

By Tuan-Binh Tran, Thanh Tam Nguyen, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Dung D. Le, Tung Kieu, Thanh Trung Huynh
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)