Large Language Models as Recommender Systems: A Study of Popularity Bias

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Hauptverfasser: Lichtenberg, Jan Malte, Buchholz, Alexander, Schwöbel, Pola
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Lichtenberg, Jan Malte
Buchholz, Alexander
Schwöbel, Pola
author_facet Lichtenberg, Jan Malte
Buchholz, Alexander
Schwöbel, Pola
contents The issue of popularity bias -- where popular items are disproportionately recommended, overshadowing less popular but potentially relevant items -- remains a significant challenge in recommender systems. Recent advancements have seen the integration of general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) into the architecture of such systems. This integration raises concerns that it might exacerbate popularity bias, given that the LLM's training data is likely dominated by popular items. However, it simultaneously presents a novel opportunity to address the bias via prompt tuning. Our study explores this dichotomy, examining whether LLMs contribute to or can alleviate popularity bias in recommender systems. We introduce a principled way to measure popularity bias by discussing existing metrics and proposing a novel metric that fulfills a series of desiderata. Based on our new metric, we compare a simple LLM-based recommender to traditional recommender systems on a movie recommendation task. We find that the LLM recommender exhibits less popularity bias, even without any explicit mitigation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_01285
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Large Language Models as Recommender Systems: A Study of Popularity Bias
Lichtenberg, Jan Malte
Buchholz, Alexander
Schwöbel, Pola
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The issue of popularity bias -- where popular items are disproportionately recommended, overshadowing less popular but potentially relevant items -- remains a significant challenge in recommender systems. Recent advancements have seen the integration of general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) into the architecture of such systems. This integration raises concerns that it might exacerbate popularity bias, given that the LLM's training data is likely dominated by popular items. However, it simultaneously presents a novel opportunity to address the bias via prompt tuning. Our study explores this dichotomy, examining whether LLMs contribute to or can alleviate popularity bias in recommender systems. We introduce a principled way to measure popularity bias by discussing existing metrics and proposing a novel metric that fulfills a series of desiderata. Based on our new metric, we compare a simple LLM-based recommender to traditional recommender systems on a movie recommendation task. We find that the LLM recommender exhibits less popularity bias, even without any explicit mitigation.
title Large Language Models as Recommender Systems: A Study of Popularity Bias
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01285