arXiv Machine Learning

Tokenizing Numerical and Embedding Features for LLM RecSys

arXiv:2607. 10016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as backbone architectures for recommender systems because of their strong sequence modeling and representation learning capabilities.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

TokenMinds: Pretrained User Tokens and Embeddings for User Understanding in Large Recommender Systems

arXiv:2606. 25147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: User modeling in industrial recommender systems typically produces dense embeddings, which suffer from representational constraints inherent to fixed-dimensional vectors.

By Qingyun Liu, Bo Yan, Yang Liu, Yuji Roh, Ekansh Sharma, Likang Yin, Emma Olowo, Min-hsuan Tsai, Yuxuan Li, Diego Uribe, Saksham Aggarwal, Siqi Wu, Yuan Hao, Vikas Kedigehalli, Lukasz Heldt, Lichan Hong, Li Wei, Xinyang Yi
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Tlow: Flow-based Item Tokenizer for Recommendation

The paper introduces Tlow, a flow-based item tokenizer that transforms raw semantic embeddings into a latent space following a standard normal distribution, enabling independent tokenization and simplifying distributional complexity. Tlow incorporates codebook guidance to align token embeddings with the codebook space, producing semantically clear token IDs. Experiments on four public datasets and an online multi‑modal retrieval task on WeChat show that Tlow improves recommendation performance and increases user click‑through rates by over 10%.

By Nian Li, Chonggang Song, Jingtao Ding, Lingling Yi, Yong Li, Qingmin Liao
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Unleash LLMs Potential for Sequential Recommendation by Coordinating Dual Dynamic Index Mechanism

The paper introduces ED$^2$, an end‑to‑end large language model–based sequential recommender that integrates index generation and recommendation through a dual dynamic index mechanism. It employs a multigrained token regulator for alignment supervision and custom instruction‑tuning tasks to capture high‑order user‑item interactions. Experiments on three public datasets show ED$^2$ outperforms baselines with an average 19.62% gain in Hit‑Rate and 21.11% in NDCG.

By Jun Yin, Zhengxin Zeng, Mingzheng Li, Hao Yan, Chaozhuo Li, Weihao Han, Jianjin Zhang, Ruochen Liu, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Shirui Pan, Senzhang Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 21

WHALE: A Scalable Unified Model for Recommendation with Wukong-HSTU Architecture

arXiv:2607. 17017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As scalability becomes increasingly important in recommendation modeling, recent architectures have advanced the modeling of two broad sources of ranking signals along separate paths: non-sequence features, including user, item, context, and cross features; and sequence features from user behavior histories.

By Renqin Cai, Dawei Sun, Yuanjun Yao, Zhiyong Wang, Velvin Fu, Maggie Zhuang, Yu Shi, Zhongnan Fang, Xuan Cao, Jing Qian, Rui Li
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 AI
Jun 26

The Best of the Two Worlds: Harmonizing Semantic and Hash IDs for Sequential Recommendation

arXiv:2512. 10388v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Conventional Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS) typically assign unique hash IDs (HID) to construct item embeddings, which mainly capture collaborative signals from historical user-item interactions.

By Ziwei Liu, Yejing Wang, Wanyu Wang, Wang Zejian, Qidong Liu, Zijian Zhang, Chong Chen, Wei Huang, Xiangyu Zhao
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Dual-Interest Sequential Product Recommendation With Multi-Granular SSM

The paper introduces DSRec, a dual‑interest sequential recommendation model that separates item representations into long‑term and short‑term semantic contexts. Long‑term embeddings capture stable preferences through historical aggregation, while short‑term embeddings focus on local session intent modulated by inter‑click time intervals. Each branch is processed by a distinct State Space Model— a full‑sequence Mamba for long‑term modeling and a time‑modulated SSM for short‑term dynamics— and a residual cross‑fusion mechanism aligns the two granularities while preserving their independence. Experiments on public benchmarks show that DSRec outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods.

By Shuiying Liao, P. Y. Mok