UNGER: Generative Recommendation with A Unified Code via Semantic and Collaborative Integration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xiao, Longtao, Wang, Haozhao, Wang, Cheng, Ji, Linfei, Wang, Yifan, Zhu, Jieming, Dong, Zhenhua, Zhang, Rui, Li, Ruixuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xiao, Longtao
Wang, Haozhao
Wang, Cheng
Ji, Linfei
Wang, Yifan
Zhu, Jieming
Dong, Zhenhua
Zhang, Rui
Li, Ruixuan
author_facet Xiao, Longtao
Wang, Haozhao
Wang, Cheng
Ji, Linfei
Wang, Yifan
Zhu, Jieming
Dong, Zhenhua
Zhang, Rui
Li, Ruixuan
contents With the rise of generative paradigms, generative recommendation has garnered increasing attention. The core component is the item code, generally derived by quantizing collaborative or semantic representations to serve as candidate items identifiers in the context. However, existing methods typically construct separate codes for each modality, leading to higher computational and storage costs and hindering the integration of their complementary strengths. Considering this limitation, we seek to integrate two different modalities into a unified code, fully unleashing the potential of complementary nature among modalities. Nevertheless, the integration remains challenging: the integrated embedding obtained by the common concatenation method would lead to underutilization of collaborative knowledge, thereby resulting in limited effectiveness. To address this, we propose a novel method, named UNGER, which integrates semantic and collaborative knowledge into a unified code for generative recommendation. Specifically, we propose to adaptively learn an integrated embedding through the joint optimization of cross-modality knowledge alignment and next item prediction tasks. Subsequently, to mitigate the information loss caused by the quantization process, we introduce an intra-modality knowledge distillation task, using the integrated embeddings as supervised signals to compensate. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to existing methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_06269
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UNGER: Generative Recommendation with A Unified Code via Semantic and Collaborative Integration
Xiao, Longtao
Wang, Haozhao
Wang, Cheng
Ji, Linfei
Wang, Yifan
Zhu, Jieming
Dong, Zhenhua
Zhang, Rui
Li, Ruixuan
Information Retrieval
With the rise of generative paradigms, generative recommendation has garnered increasing attention. The core component is the item code, generally derived by quantizing collaborative or semantic representations to serve as candidate items identifiers in the context. However, existing methods typically construct separate codes for each modality, leading to higher computational and storage costs and hindering the integration of their complementary strengths. Considering this limitation, we seek to integrate two different modalities into a unified code, fully unleashing the potential of complementary nature among modalities. Nevertheless, the integration remains challenging: the integrated embedding obtained by the common concatenation method would lead to underutilization of collaborative knowledge, thereby resulting in limited effectiveness. To address this, we propose a novel method, named UNGER, which integrates semantic and collaborative knowledge into a unified code for generative recommendation. Specifically, we propose to adaptively learn an integrated embedding through the joint optimization of cross-modality knowledge alignment and next item prediction tasks. Subsequently, to mitigate the information loss caused by the quantization process, we introduce an intra-modality knowledge distillation task, using the integrated embeddings as supervised signals to compensate. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to existing methods.
title UNGER: Generative Recommendation with A Unified Code via Semantic and Collaborative Integration
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06269