LLM-ESR: Large Language Models Enhancement for Long-tailed Sequential Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Qidong, Wu, Xian, Wang, Yejing, Zhang, Zijian, Tian, Feng, Zheng, Yefeng, Zhao, Xiangyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Liu, Qidong
Wu, Xian
Wang, Yejing
Zhang, Zijian
Tian, Feng
Zheng, Yefeng
Zhao, Xiangyu
author_facet Liu, Qidong
Wu, Xian
Wang, Yejing
Zhang, Zijian
Tian, Feng
Zheng, Yefeng
Zhao, Xiangyu
contents Sequential recommender systems (SRS) aim to predict users' subsequent choices based on their historical interactions and have found applications in diverse fields such as e-commerce and social media. However, in real-world systems, most users interact with only a handful of items, while the majority of items are seldom consumed. These two issues, known as the long-tail user and long-tail item challenges, often pose difficulties for existing SRS. These challenges can adversely affect user experience and seller benefits, making them crucial to address. Though a few works have addressed the challenges, they still struggle with the seesaw or noisy issues due to the intrinsic scarcity of interactions. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) present a promising solution to these problems from a semantic perspective. As one of the pioneers in this field, we propose the Large Language Models Enhancement framework for Sequential Recommendation (LLM-ESR). This framework utilizes semantic embeddings derived from LLMs to enhance SRS without adding extra inference load from LLMs. To address the long-tail item challenge, we design a dual-view modeling framework that combines semantics from LLMs and collaborative signals from conventional SRS. For the long-tail user challenge, we propose a retrieval augmented self-distillation method to enhance user preference representation using more informative interactions from similar users. To verify the effectiveness and versatility of our proposed enhancement framework, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets using three popular SRS models. The results show that our method surpasses existing baselines consistently, and benefits long-tail users and items especially. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/LLM-ESR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_20646
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM-ESR: Large Language Models Enhancement for Long-tailed Sequential Recommendation
Liu, Qidong
Wu, Xian
Wang, Yejing
Zhang, Zijian
Tian, Feng
Zheng, Yefeng
Zhao, Xiangyu
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Sequential recommender systems (SRS) aim to predict users' subsequent choices based on their historical interactions and have found applications in diverse fields such as e-commerce and social media. However, in real-world systems, most users interact with only a handful of items, while the majority of items are seldom consumed. These two issues, known as the long-tail user and long-tail item challenges, often pose difficulties for existing SRS. These challenges can adversely affect user experience and seller benefits, making them crucial to address. Though a few works have addressed the challenges, they still struggle with the seesaw or noisy issues due to the intrinsic scarcity of interactions. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) present a promising solution to these problems from a semantic perspective. As one of the pioneers in this field, we propose the Large Language Models Enhancement framework for Sequential Recommendation (LLM-ESR). This framework utilizes semantic embeddings derived from LLMs to enhance SRS without adding extra inference load from LLMs. To address the long-tail item challenge, we design a dual-view modeling framework that combines semantics from LLMs and collaborative signals from conventional SRS. For the long-tail user challenge, we propose a retrieval augmented self-distillation method to enhance user preference representation using more informative interactions from similar users. To verify the effectiveness and versatility of our proposed enhancement framework, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets using three popular SRS models. The results show that our method surpasses existing baselines consistently, and benefits long-tail users and items especially. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/LLM-ESR.
title LLM-ESR: Large Language Models Enhancement for Long-tailed Sequential Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20646