Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Rankers for Recommender Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Hou, Yupeng, Zhang, Junjie, Lin, Zihan, Lu, Hongyu, Xie, Ruobing, McAuley, Julian, Zhao, Wayne Xin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Hou, Yupeng
Zhang, Junjie
Lin, Zihan
Lu, Hongyu
Xie, Ruobing
McAuley, Julian
Zhao, Wayne Xin
author_facet Hou, Yupeng
Zhang, Junjie
Lin, Zihan
Lu, Hongyu
Xie, Ruobing
McAuley, Julian
Zhao, Wayne Xin
contents Recently, large language models (LLMs) (e.g., GPT-4) have demonstrated impressive general-purpose task-solving abilities, including the potential to approach recommendation tasks. Along this line of research, this work aims to investigate the capacity of LLMs that act as the ranking model for recommender systems. We first formalize the recommendation problem as a conditional ranking task, considering sequential interaction histories as conditions and the items retrieved by other candidate generation models as candidates. To solve the ranking task by LLMs, we carefully design the prompting template and conduct extensive experiments on two widely-used datasets. We show that LLMs have promising zero-shot ranking abilities but (1) struggle to perceive the order of historical interactions, and (2) can be biased by popularity or item positions in the prompts. We demonstrate that these issues can be alleviated using specially designed prompting and bootstrapping strategies. Equipped with these insights, zero-shot LLMs can even challenge conventional recommendation models when ranking candidates are retrieved by multiple candidate generators. The code and processed datasets are available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LLMRank.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_08845
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Rankers for Recommender Systems
Hou, Yupeng
Zhang, Junjie
Lin, Zihan
Lu, Hongyu
Xie, Ruobing
McAuley, Julian
Zhao, Wayne Xin
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Recently, large language models (LLMs) (e.g., GPT-4) have demonstrated impressive general-purpose task-solving abilities, including the potential to approach recommendation tasks. Along this line of research, this work aims to investigate the capacity of LLMs that act as the ranking model for recommender systems. We first formalize the recommendation problem as a conditional ranking task, considering sequential interaction histories as conditions and the items retrieved by other candidate generation models as candidates. To solve the ranking task by LLMs, we carefully design the prompting template and conduct extensive experiments on two widely-used datasets. We show that LLMs have promising zero-shot ranking abilities but (1) struggle to perceive the order of historical interactions, and (2) can be biased by popularity or item positions in the prompts. We demonstrate that these issues can be alleviated using specially designed prompting and bootstrapping strategies. Equipped with these insights, zero-shot LLMs can even challenge conventional recommendation models when ranking candidates are retrieved by multiple candidate generators. The code and processed datasets are available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LLMRank.
title Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Rankers for Recommender Systems
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08845