RecGPT: A Foundation Model for Sequential Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jiang, Yangqin, Ren, Xubin, Xia, Lianghao, Luo, Da, Lin, Kangyi, Huang, Chao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912427209129984
author Jiang, Yangqin
Ren, Xubin
Xia, Lianghao
Luo, Da
Lin, Kangyi
Huang, Chao
author_facet Jiang, Yangqin
Ren, Xubin
Xia, Lianghao
Luo, Da
Lin, Kangyi
Huang, Chao
contents This work addresses a fundamental barrier in recommender systems: the inability to generalize across domains without extensive retraining. Traditional ID-based approaches fail entirely in cold-start and cross-domain scenarios where new users or items lack sufficient interaction history. Inspired by foundation models' cross-domain success, we develop a foundation model for sequential recommendation that achieves genuine zero-shot generalization capabilities. Our approach fundamentally departs from existing ID-based methods by deriving item representations exclusively from textual features. This enables immediate embedding of any new item without model retraining. We introduce unified item tokenization with Finite Scalar Quantization that transforms heterogeneous textual descriptions into standardized discrete tokens. This eliminates domain barriers that plague existing systems. Additionally, the framework features hybrid bidirectional-causal attention that captures both intra-item token coherence and inter-item sequential dependencies. An efficient catalog-aware beam search decoder enables real-time token-to-item mapping. Unlike conventional approaches confined to their training domains, RecGPT naturally bridges diverse recommendation contexts through its domain-invariant tokenization mechanism. Comprehensive evaluations across six datasets and industrial scenarios demonstrate consistent performance advantages.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06270
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RecGPT: A Foundation Model for Sequential Recommendation
Jiang, Yangqin
Ren, Xubin
Xia, Lianghao
Luo, Da
Lin, Kangyi
Huang, Chao
Information Retrieval
This work addresses a fundamental barrier in recommender systems: the inability to generalize across domains without extensive retraining. Traditional ID-based approaches fail entirely in cold-start and cross-domain scenarios where new users or items lack sufficient interaction history. Inspired by foundation models' cross-domain success, we develop a foundation model for sequential recommendation that achieves genuine zero-shot generalization capabilities. Our approach fundamentally departs from existing ID-based methods by deriving item representations exclusively from textual features. This enables immediate embedding of any new item without model retraining. We introduce unified item tokenization with Finite Scalar Quantization that transforms heterogeneous textual descriptions into standardized discrete tokens. This eliminates domain barriers that plague existing systems. Additionally, the framework features hybrid bidirectional-causal attention that captures both intra-item token coherence and inter-item sequential dependencies. An efficient catalog-aware beam search decoder enables real-time token-to-item mapping. Unlike conventional approaches confined to their training domains, RecGPT naturally bridges diverse recommendation contexts through its domain-invariant tokenization mechanism. Comprehensive evaluations across six datasets and industrial scenarios demonstrate consistent performance advantages.
title RecGPT: A Foundation Model for Sequential Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06270