The article surveys graph foundation models (GFMs) for recommender systems, highlighting how they combine graph neural networks (GNNs) and large language models (LLMs) to better capture user-item relationships and textual data. It offers a taxonomy of current GFM approaches, discusses methodological details, and identifies key challenges and future research directions. The survey aims to provide comprehensive insights into the evolving landscape of GFM-based recommender systems.
By Bin Wu, Yihang Wang, Yuanhao Zeng, Jiawei Liu, Jiashu Zhao, Cheng Yang, Yawen Li, Long Xia, Dawei Yin, Chuan Shi
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:2601. 02366v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph-based recommendation has achieved great success in recent years.
By Yiwen Chen, Yiqing Wu, Huishi Luo, Fuzhen Zhuang, Deqing Wang, Zhao Zhang
arXiv:2506. 07449v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven their adoption in recommender systems through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks.
By Vahid Azizi, Fatemeh Koochaki
arXiv:2606. 07526v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for recommendation (LLMRec) due to their powerful reasoning and generalization abilities.
By Lin Mu, Guoji Wang, Li Ni, Lei Sang, Zhize Wu, Peiquan Jin, Yiwen Zhang
arXiv:2607. 20477v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: {\em Text-Attributed Graphs} (TAGs) have emerged as an expressive data model for integrating graph topology with rich textual semantics.
By Yurui Lai, Samir Moustafa, Renchi Yang, Tsz Nam Chan
The paper studies candidate generation for alternative vacation rental recommendations, comparing collaborative filtering, shallow embeddings, and graph neural network (GNN) methods on a platform with over 2 million active properties. A hybrid model that combines item-based collaborative filtering with GNN-based retrieval achieves a 14.8% higher Recall@300 than the best baseline, leveraging each method’s strengths: collaborative filtering for well-interacted properties and GNNs for diverse, cold-start alternatives. The authors also show that stronger candidate pools improve downstream ranking quality, though the exact impact is intertwined with ranker training.
By Syed Mohammed Arshad Zaidi, Eric Rincon, Shayan Hassantabar
arXiv:2508.02609v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been extensively applied to industry recommendation systems, as seen in models like GraphSage\cite{GraphSage...
By Jiayin Jin, Erika Sun, Zhimeng Pan, Yang Tang, Jiarui Feng, Kungang Li, Chongyuan Xiang, Jiacheng Li, Runze Su, Siping Ji, Han Sun, Ling Leng, Prathibha Deshikachar
arXiv:2606. 15277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based recommender systems are highly effective at extracting collaborative signals from user--item interactions, and federated learning (FL) allows these models to be trained while preserving user privacy.
By Thi Minh Chau Nguyen, Hien Trang Nguyen, Duc Anh Nguyen, Van Ho-Long, Thanh Trung Huynh, Zhao Ren
arXiv:2608. 15055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hypergraphs effectively model higher-order groupwise relationships beyond pairwise interactions, while pretrained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs) provide rich semantic understanding from textual attributes.
By David Yoon Suk Kang, JungHyun Kim, Juhyun Jeon, Sang-Wook Kim
arXiv:2607. 20737v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph Neural Networks trained on heterogenous bipartite graphs form a common basis in recommendation systems.
By Parul Maheshwari, Amulya Paruchuri, Yiqing Zou, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Farhad Farahani, Prakhar Mehrotra
arXiv:2608. 16407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation models based on graph neural networks achieve strong performance by propagating collaborative signals over user-item interactions, yet they struggle with the cold-start problem, where items with few or no interactions are not represented.
By Burak Tamer, Wolfram H\"opken, Zehui Wang