Revisiting Generative vs. Dense Retrieval: A Static Value Prior Reverses the Gap
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
Generative retrieval (GR) has emerged as a strong candidate generator for sequential recommendation as language models and semantic-item identifiers have improved. However, GR is not a uniformly stron...
arXiv:2606. 01504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic retrieval in e-commerce must handle short, noisy, and colloquial queries over large product catalogs with fine-grained attribute distinctions.
arXiv:2607. 27172v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional search systems are optimized to retrieve items that strictly match a query, often prioritizing precision over recall.
Traditional search systems are optimized to retrieve items that strictly match a query, often prioritizing precision over recall. In e-commerce marketplaces and particularly grocery, this paradigm is limiting, as user satisfaction and commercial outcomes depend heavily on the discoverability of substitute, complementary, and thematically related items.
arXiv:2603. 29247v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based shopping agents increasingly rely on long purchase histories and multi-turn interactions for personalization, yet naively appending raw history to prompts is often ineffective due to noise, length, and relevance mismatch.
The paper examines LLM-based recommendation rerankers that are often evaluated under an oracle protocol, which guarantees the ground-truth item is present in the scored set. Across Amazon datasets, this protocol overestimates realistic NDCG@10 by 92–95% because realistic retrieval only covers 2–19% of relevant items at K=100, creating a recall ceiling that limits any closed-candidate reranker's top‑k NDCG. The authors find that various optimisation strategies—including prompt engineering, model scaling, sequential models, supervised neural rerankers, LoRA fine‑tuning, hybrid retrieval, score‑aware prompting, and LLM+CF fusion—do not significantly improve over a collaborative‑filtering baseline under realistic retrieval, and they propose a Recall‑Aware Evaluation Protocol (RAEP) to better assess rerankers in low‑recall regimes.