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:2608. 11980v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic-ID generative recommenders represent each item as a short sequence of discrete semantic tokens and predict the next item by autoregressively generating this token sequence.
By Kangning Zhang, Haotian Fang, Xukun Luo, Hao Yin, Yang Gao, Peng Yan, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu
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
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:2608. 11980v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Semantic-ID generative recommenders represent each item as a short sequence of discrete semantic tokens and predict the next item by autoregressively generating this token sequence.
By Kangning Zhang, Haotian Fang, Xukun Luo, Hao Yin, Yang Gao, Peng Yan, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu
arXiv:2604. 20861v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Semantic IDs (SIDs) provide the discrete item vocabulary used by generative recommendation, but their quality depends on what item evidence is preserved before quantization.
By Yangchen Zeng, Jinze Wang