Hard Negative Sampling via Large Language Models for Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhao, Chu, Yang, Enneng, Liu, Yuting, Zhao, Jianzhe, Guo, Guibing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhao, Chu
Yang, Enneng
Liu, Yuting
Zhao, Jianzhe
Guo, Guibing
author_facet Zhao, Chu
Yang, Enneng
Liu, Yuting
Zhao, Jianzhe
Guo, Guibing
contents Hard negative sampling improves recommendation performance by accelerating convergence and sharpening the decision boundary. However, most existing methods rely on heuristic strategies, selecting negatives from a fixed candidate pool. Lacking semantic awareness, these methods often misclassify items that align with users' semantic interests as negatives, resulting in False Hard Negative Samples (FHNS). Such FHNS inject noisy supervision and hinder the model's optimal performance. To address this challenge, we propose HNLMRec, a generative semantic negative sampling framework. Leveraging the semantic reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), HNLMRec directly generates negative samples that are behaviorally distinct yet semantically relevant with respect to user preferences. Furthermore, we integrate collaborative filtering signals into the LLM via supervised fine-tuning, guiding the model to synthesize more reliable and informative hard negatives. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that HNLMRec significantly outperforms traditional methods and LLM-enhanced baselines, while effectively mitigating popularity bias and data sparsity, thereby improving generalization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_04726
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hard Negative Sampling via Large Language Models for Recommendation
Zhao, Chu
Yang, Enneng
Liu, Yuting
Zhao, Jianzhe
Guo, Guibing
Information Retrieval
Hard negative sampling improves recommendation performance by accelerating convergence and sharpening the decision boundary. However, most existing methods rely on heuristic strategies, selecting negatives from a fixed candidate pool. Lacking semantic awareness, these methods often misclassify items that align with users' semantic interests as negatives, resulting in False Hard Negative Samples (FHNS). Such FHNS inject noisy supervision and hinder the model's optimal performance. To address this challenge, we propose HNLMRec, a generative semantic negative sampling framework. Leveraging the semantic reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), HNLMRec directly generates negative samples that are behaviorally distinct yet semantically relevant with respect to user preferences. Furthermore, we integrate collaborative filtering signals into the LLM via supervised fine-tuning, guiding the model to synthesize more reliable and informative hard negatives. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that HNLMRec significantly outperforms traditional methods and LLM-enhanced baselines, while effectively mitigating popularity bias and data sparsity, thereby improving generalization.
title Hard Negative Sampling via Large Language Models for Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04726