A Simple Contrastive Framework Of Item Tokenization For Generative Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhai, Penglong, Yuan, Yifang, Di, Fanyi, Li, Jie, Liu, Yue, Li, Chen, Huang, Jie, Wang, Sicong, Xu, Yao, Li, Xin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Zhai, Penglong
Yuan, Yifang
Di, Fanyi
Li, Jie
Liu, Yue
Li, Chen
Huang, Jie
Wang, Sicong
Xu, Yao
Li, Xin
author_facet Zhai, Penglong
Yuan, Yifang
Di, Fanyi
Li, Jie
Liu, Yue
Li, Chen
Huang, Jie
Wang, Sicong
Xu, Yao
Li, Xin
contents Generative retrieval-based recommendation has emerged as a promising paradigm aiming at directly generating the identifiers of the target candidates. However, in large-scale recommendation systems, this approach becomes increasingly cumbersome due to the redundancy and sheer scale of the token space. To overcome these limitations, recent research has explored the use of semantic tokens as an alternative to ID tokens, which typically leveraged reconstruction-based strategies, like RQ-VAE, to quantize content embeddings and significantly reduce the embedding size. However, reconstructive quantization aims for the precise reconstruction of each item embedding independently, which conflicts with the goal of generative retrieval tasks focusing more on differentiating among items. Moreover, multi-modal side information of items, such as descriptive text and images, geographical knowledge in location-based recommendation services, has been shown to be effective in improving recommendations by providing richer contexts for interactions. Nevertheless, effectively integrating such complementary knowledge into existing generative recommendation frameworks remains challenging. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel unsupervised deep quantization exclusively based on contrastive learning, named SimCIT (a Simple Contrastive Item Tokenization framework). Specifically, different from existing reconstruction-based strategies, SimCIT propose to use a learnable residual quantization module to align with the signals from different modalities of the items, which combines multi-modal knowledge alignment and semantic tokenization in a mutually beneficial contrastive learning framework. Extensive experiments across public datasets and a large-scale industrial dataset from various domains demonstrate SimCIT's effectiveness in LLM-based generative recommendation.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_16683
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Simple Contrastive Framework Of Item Tokenization For Generative Recommendation
Zhai, Penglong
Yuan, Yifang
Di, Fanyi
Li, Jie
Liu, Yue
Li, Chen
Huang, Jie
Wang, Sicong
Xu, Yao
Li, Xin
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Generative retrieval-based recommendation has emerged as a promising paradigm aiming at directly generating the identifiers of the target candidates. However, in large-scale recommendation systems, this approach becomes increasingly cumbersome due to the redundancy and sheer scale of the token space. To overcome these limitations, recent research has explored the use of semantic tokens as an alternative to ID tokens, which typically leveraged reconstruction-based strategies, like RQ-VAE, to quantize content embeddings and significantly reduce the embedding size. However, reconstructive quantization aims for the precise reconstruction of each item embedding independently, which conflicts with the goal of generative retrieval tasks focusing more on differentiating among items. Moreover, multi-modal side information of items, such as descriptive text and images, geographical knowledge in location-based recommendation services, has been shown to be effective in improving recommendations by providing richer contexts for interactions. Nevertheless, effectively integrating such complementary knowledge into existing generative recommendation frameworks remains challenging. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel unsupervised deep quantization exclusively based on contrastive learning, named SimCIT (a Simple Contrastive Item Tokenization framework). Specifically, different from existing reconstruction-based strategies, SimCIT propose to use a learnable residual quantization module to align with the signals from different modalities of the items, which combines multi-modal knowledge alignment and semantic tokenization in a mutually beneficial contrastive learning framework. Extensive experiments across public datasets and a large-scale industrial dataset from various domains demonstrate SimCIT's effectiveness in LLM-based generative recommendation.
title A Simple Contrastive Framework Of Item Tokenization For Generative Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16683