From Prompting to Alignment: A Generative Framework for Query Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Min, Erxue, Huang, Hsiu-Yuan, Yang, Xihong, Yang, Min, Jia, Xin, Wu, Yunfang, Cai, Hengyi, Wang, Junfeng, Wang, Shuaiqiang, Yin, Dawei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911040647725056
author Min, Erxue
Huang, Hsiu-Yuan
Yang, Xihong
Yang, Min
Jia, Xin
Wu, Yunfang
Cai, Hengyi
Wang, Junfeng
Wang, Shuaiqiang
Yin, Dawei
author_facet Min, Erxue
Huang, Hsiu-Yuan
Yang, Xihong
Yang, Min
Jia, Xin
Wu, Yunfang
Cai, Hengyi
Wang, Junfeng
Wang, Shuaiqiang
Yin, Dawei
contents In modern search systems, search engines often suggest relevant queries to users through various panels or components, helping refine their information needs. Traditionally, these recommendations heavily rely on historical search logs to build models, which suffer from cold-start or long-tail issues. Furthermore, tasks such as query suggestion, completion or clarification are studied separately by specific design, which lacks generalizability and hinders adaptation to novel applications. Despite recent attempts to explore the use of LLMs for query recommendation, these methods mainly rely on the inherent knowledge of LLMs or external sources like few-shot examples, retrieved documents, or knowledge bases, neglecting the importance of the calibration and alignment with user feedback, thus limiting their practical utility. To address these challenges, we first propose a general Generative Query Recommendation (GQR) framework that aligns LLM-based query generation with user preference. Specifically, we unify diverse query recommendation tasks by a universal prompt framework, leveraging the instruct-following capability of LLMs for effective generation. Secondly, we align LLMs with user feedback via presenting a CTR-alignment framework, which involves training a query-wise CTR predictor as a process reward model and employing list-wise preference alignment to maximize the click probability of the generated query list. Furthermore, recognizing the inconsistency between LLM knowledge and proactive search intents arising from the separation of user-initiated queries from models, we align LLMs with user initiative via retrieving co-occurrence queries as side information when historical logs are available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_10208
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Prompting to Alignment: A Generative Framework for Query Recommendation
Min, Erxue
Huang, Hsiu-Yuan
Yang, Xihong
Yang, Min
Jia, Xin
Wu, Yunfang
Cai, Hengyi
Wang, Junfeng
Wang, Shuaiqiang
Yin, Dawei
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
In modern search systems, search engines often suggest relevant queries to users through various panels or components, helping refine their information needs. Traditionally, these recommendations heavily rely on historical search logs to build models, which suffer from cold-start or long-tail issues. Furthermore, tasks such as query suggestion, completion or clarification are studied separately by specific design, which lacks generalizability and hinders adaptation to novel applications. Despite recent attempts to explore the use of LLMs for query recommendation, these methods mainly rely on the inherent knowledge of LLMs or external sources like few-shot examples, retrieved documents, or knowledge bases, neglecting the importance of the calibration and alignment with user feedback, thus limiting their practical utility. To address these challenges, we first propose a general Generative Query Recommendation (GQR) framework that aligns LLM-based query generation with user preference. Specifically, we unify diverse query recommendation tasks by a universal prompt framework, leveraging the instruct-following capability of LLMs for effective generation. Secondly, we align LLMs with user feedback via presenting a CTR-alignment framework, which involves training a query-wise CTR predictor as a process reward model and employing list-wise preference alignment to maximize the click probability of the generated query list. Furthermore, recognizing the inconsistency between LLM knowledge and proactive search intents arising from the separation of user-initiated queries from models, we align LLMs with user initiative via retrieving co-occurrence queries as side information when historical logs are available.
title From Prompting to Alignment: A Generative Framework for Query Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10208