Unified Generative Search and Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shi, Teng, Xu, Jun, Zhang, Xiao, Zang, Xiaoxue, Zheng, Kai, Song, Yang, Yu, Enyun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shi, Teng
Xu, Jun
Zhang, Xiao
Zang, Xiaoxue
Zheng, Kai
Song, Yang
Yu, Enyun
author_facet Shi, Teng
Xu, Jun
Zhang, Xiao
Zang, Xiaoxue
Zheng, Kai
Song, Yang
Yu, Enyun
contents Modern commercial platforms typically offer both search and recommendation functionalities to serve diverse user needs, making joint modeling of these tasks an appealing direction. While prior work has shown that integrating search and recommendation can be mutually beneficial, it also reveals a performance trade-off: enhancements in one task often come at the expense of the other. This challenge arises from their distinct information requirements: search emphasizes semantic relevance between queries and items, whereas recommendation depends more on collaborative signals among users and items. Effectively addressing this trade-off requires tackling two key problems: (1) integrating both semantic and collaborative signals into item representations, and (2) guiding the model to distinguish and adapt to the unique demands of search and recommendation. The emergence of generative retrieval with Large Language Models (LLMs) presents new possibilities. This paradigm encodes items as identifiers and frames both search and recommendation as sequential generation tasks, offering the flexibility to leverage multiple identifiers and task-specific prompts. In light of this, we introduce GenSAR, a unified generative framework for balanced search and recommendation. Our approach designs dual-purpose identifiers and tailored training strategies to incorporate complementary signals and align with task-specific objectives. Experiments on both public and commercial datasets demonstrate that GenSAR effectively reduces the trade-off and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_05730
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unified Generative Search and Recommendation
Shi, Teng
Xu, Jun
Zhang, Xiao
Zang, Xiaoxue
Zheng, Kai
Song, Yang
Yu, Enyun
Information Retrieval
Modern commercial platforms typically offer both search and recommendation functionalities to serve diverse user needs, making joint modeling of these tasks an appealing direction. While prior work has shown that integrating search and recommendation can be mutually beneficial, it also reveals a performance trade-off: enhancements in one task often come at the expense of the other. This challenge arises from their distinct information requirements: search emphasizes semantic relevance between queries and items, whereas recommendation depends more on collaborative signals among users and items. Effectively addressing this trade-off requires tackling two key problems: (1) integrating both semantic and collaborative signals into item representations, and (2) guiding the model to distinguish and adapt to the unique demands of search and recommendation. The emergence of generative retrieval with Large Language Models (LLMs) presents new possibilities. This paradigm encodes items as identifiers and frames both search and recommendation as sequential generation tasks, offering the flexibility to leverage multiple identifiers and task-specific prompts. In light of this, we introduce GenSAR, a unified generative framework for balanced search and recommendation. Our approach designs dual-purpose identifiers and tailored training strategies to incorporate complementary signals and align with task-specific objectives. Experiments on both public and commercial datasets demonstrate that GenSAR effectively reduces the trade-off and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tasks.
title Unified Generative Search and Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05730