BiFair: A Fairness-aware Training Framework for LLM-enhanced Recommender Systems via Bi-level Optimization
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arXiv
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| Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2025
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | |
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| _version_ | 1866911041546354688 |
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| author | Zhang, Jiaming Li, Yuyuan Xu, Yiqun Zhang, Li Feng, Xiaohua Ren, Zhifei Chen, Chaochao |
| author_facet | Zhang, Jiaming Li, Yuyuan Xu, Yiqun Zhang, Li Feng, Xiaohua Ren, Zhifei Chen, Chaochao |
| contents | Large Language Model-enhanced Recommender Systems (LLM-enhanced RSs) have emerged as a powerful approach to improving recommendation quality by leveraging LLMs to generate item representations. Despite these advancements, the integration of LLMs raises severe fairness concerns. Existing studies reveal that LLM-based RSs exhibit greater unfairness than traditional RSs, yet fairness issues in LLM-enhanced RSs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, our empirical study reveals that while LLM-enhanced RSs improve fairness across item groups, a significant fairness gap persists. Further enhancement remains challenging due to the architectural differences and varying sources of unfairness inherent in LLM-enhanced RSs. To bridge this gap, we first decompose unfairness into i) \textit{prior unfairness} in LLM-generated representations and ii) \textit{training unfairness} in recommendation models. Then, we propose BiFair, a bi-level optimization-based fairness-aware training framework designed to mitigate both prior and training unfairness simultaneously. BiFair optimizes two sets of learnable parameters: LLM-generated representations and a trainable projector in the recommendation model, using a two-level nested optimization process. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive inter-group balancing mechanism, leveraging multi-objective optimization principles to dynamically balance fairness across item groups. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that BiFair significantly mitigates unfairness and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_04294 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | BiFair: A Fairness-aware Training Framework for LLM-enhanced Recommender Systems via Bi-level Optimization Zhang, Jiaming Li, Yuyuan Xu, Yiqun Zhang, Li Feng, Xiaohua Ren, Zhifei Chen, Chaochao Information Retrieval Large Language Model-enhanced Recommender Systems (LLM-enhanced RSs) have emerged as a powerful approach to improving recommendation quality by leveraging LLMs to generate item representations. Despite these advancements, the integration of LLMs raises severe fairness concerns. Existing studies reveal that LLM-based RSs exhibit greater unfairness than traditional RSs, yet fairness issues in LLM-enhanced RSs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, our empirical study reveals that while LLM-enhanced RSs improve fairness across item groups, a significant fairness gap persists. Further enhancement remains challenging due to the architectural differences and varying sources of unfairness inherent in LLM-enhanced RSs. To bridge this gap, we first decompose unfairness into i) \textit{prior unfairness} in LLM-generated representations and ii) \textit{training unfairness} in recommendation models. Then, we propose BiFair, a bi-level optimization-based fairness-aware training framework designed to mitigate both prior and training unfairness simultaneously. BiFair optimizes two sets of learnable parameters: LLM-generated representations and a trainable projector in the recommendation model, using a two-level nested optimization process. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive inter-group balancing mechanism, leveraging multi-objective optimization principles to dynamically balance fairness across item groups. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that BiFair significantly mitigates unfairness and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. |
| title | BiFair: A Fairness-aware Training Framework for LLM-enhanced Recommender Systems via Bi-level Optimization |
| topic | Information Retrieval |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04294 |