RALLRec: Improving Retrieval Augmented Large Language Model Recommendation with Representation Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Jian, Luo, Sichun, Chen, Xiangyu, Huang, Haoming, Hou, Hanxu, Song, Linqi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Jian
Luo, Sichun
Chen, Xiangyu
Huang, Haoming
Hou, Hanxu
Song, Linqi
author_facet Xu, Jian
Luo, Sichun
Chen, Xiangyu
Huang, Haoming
Hou, Hanxu
Song, Linqi
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have been integrated into recommendation systems to enhance user behavior comprehension. The Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technique is further incorporated into these systems to retrieve more relevant items and improve system performance. However, existing RAG methods rely primarily on textual semantics and often fail to incorporate the most relevant items, limiting the effectiveness of the systems. In this paper, we propose Representation learning for retrieval-Augmented Large Language model Recommendation (RALLRec). Specifically, we enhance textual semantics by prompting LLMs to generate more detailed item descriptions, followed by joint representation learning of textual and collaborative semantics, which are extracted by the LLM and recommendation models, respectively. Considering the potential time-varying characteristics of user interest, a simple yet effective reranking method is further introduced to capture the dynamics of user preference. We conducted extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, and the evaluation results validated the effectiveness of our method. Code is made public at https://github.com/JianXu95/RALLRec.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_06101
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RALLRec: Improving Retrieval Augmented Large Language Model Recommendation with Representation Learning
Xu, Jian
Luo, Sichun
Chen, Xiangyu
Huang, Haoming
Hou, Hanxu
Song, Linqi
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been integrated into recommendation systems to enhance user behavior comprehension. The Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technique is further incorporated into these systems to retrieve more relevant items and improve system performance. However, existing RAG methods rely primarily on textual semantics and often fail to incorporate the most relevant items, limiting the effectiveness of the systems. In this paper, we propose Representation learning for retrieval-Augmented Large Language model Recommendation (RALLRec). Specifically, we enhance textual semantics by prompting LLMs to generate more detailed item descriptions, followed by joint representation learning of textual and collaborative semantics, which are extracted by the LLM and recommendation models, respectively. Considering the potential time-varying characteristics of user interest, a simple yet effective reranking method is further introduced to capture the dynamics of user preference. We conducted extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, and the evaluation results validated the effectiveness of our method. Code is made public at https://github.com/JianXu95/RALLRec.
title RALLRec: Improving Retrieval Augmented Large Language Model Recommendation with Representation Learning
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06101