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Main Authors: Senel, Lütfi Kerem, Fetahu, Besnik, Yoshida, Davis, Chen, Zhiyu, Castellucci, Giuseppe, Vedula, Nikhita, Choi, Jason, Malmasi, Shervin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05255
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author Senel, Lütfi Kerem
Fetahu, Besnik
Yoshida, Davis
Chen, Zhiyu
Castellucci, Giuseppe
Vedula, Nikhita
Choi, Jason
Malmasi, Shervin
author_facet Senel, Lütfi Kerem
Fetahu, Besnik
Yoshida, Davis
Chen, Zhiyu
Castellucci, Giuseppe
Vedula, Nikhita
Choi, Jason
Malmasi, Shervin
contents Recommender systems are widely used to suggest engaging content, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have given rise to generative recommenders. Such systems can directly generate items, including for open-set tasks like question suggestion. While the world knowledge of LLMs enable good recommendations, improving the generated content through user feedback is challenging as continuously fine-tuning LLMs is prohibitively expensive. We present a training-free approach for optimizing generative recommenders by connecting user feedback loops to LLM-based optimizers. We propose a generative explore-exploit method that can not only exploit generated items with known high engagement, but also actively explore and discover hidden population preferences to improve recommendation quality. We evaluate our approach on question generation in two domains (e-commerce and general knowledge), and model user feedback with Click Through Rate (CTR). Experiments show our LLM-based explore-exploit approach can iteratively improve recommendations, and consistently increase CTR. Ablation analysis shows that generative exploration is key to learning user preferences, avoiding the pitfalls of greedy exploit-only approaches. A human evaluation strongly supports our quantitative findings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_05255
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generative Explore-Exploit: Training-free Optimization of Generative Recommender Systems using LLM Optimizers
Senel, Lütfi Kerem
Fetahu, Besnik
Yoshida, Davis
Chen, Zhiyu
Castellucci, Giuseppe
Vedula, Nikhita
Choi, Jason
Malmasi, Shervin
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Recommender systems are widely used to suggest engaging content, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have given rise to generative recommenders. Such systems can directly generate items, including for open-set tasks like question suggestion. While the world knowledge of LLMs enable good recommendations, improving the generated content through user feedback is challenging as continuously fine-tuning LLMs is prohibitively expensive. We present a training-free approach for optimizing generative recommenders by connecting user feedback loops to LLM-based optimizers. We propose a generative explore-exploit method that can not only exploit generated items with known high engagement, but also actively explore and discover hidden population preferences to improve recommendation quality. We evaluate our approach on question generation in two domains (e-commerce and general knowledge), and model user feedback with Click Through Rate (CTR). Experiments show our LLM-based explore-exploit approach can iteratively improve recommendations, and consistently increase CTR. Ablation analysis shows that generative exploration is key to learning user preferences, avoiding the pitfalls of greedy exploit-only approaches. A human evaluation strongly supports our quantitative findings.
title Generative Explore-Exploit: Training-free Optimization of Generative Recommender Systems using LLM Optimizers
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05255