Beyond Single Labels: Improving Conversational Recommendation through LLM-Powered Data Augmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Haozhe, Wang, Xiaohua, Lv, Changze, Zheng, Xiaoqing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Haozhe
Wang, Xiaohua
Lv, Changze
Zheng, Xiaoqing
author_facet Xu, Haozhe
Wang, Xiaohua
Lv, Changze
Zheng, Xiaoqing
contents Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) enhance recommendation quality by engaging users in multi-turn dialogues, capturing nuanced preferences through natural language interactions. However, these systems often face the false negative issue, where items that a user might like are incorrectly labeled as negative during training, leading to suboptimal recommendations.Expanding the label set through data augmentation presents an intuitive solution but faces the challenge of balancing two key aspects: ensuring semantic relevance and preserving the collaborative information inherent in CRS datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel data augmentation framework that first leverages an LLM-based semantic retriever to identify diverse and semantically relevant items, which are then filtered by a relevance scorer to remove noisy candidates. Building on this, we introduce a two-stage training strategy balancing semantic relevance and collaborative information. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets and user simulators demonstrate significant and consistent performance improvements across various recommenders, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in advancing CRS performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_05657
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Single Labels: Improving Conversational Recommendation through LLM-Powered Data Augmentation
Xu, Haozhe
Wang, Xiaohua
Lv, Changze
Zheng, Xiaoqing
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) enhance recommendation quality by engaging users in multi-turn dialogues, capturing nuanced preferences through natural language interactions. However, these systems often face the false negative issue, where items that a user might like are incorrectly labeled as negative during training, leading to suboptimal recommendations.Expanding the label set through data augmentation presents an intuitive solution but faces the challenge of balancing two key aspects: ensuring semantic relevance and preserving the collaborative information inherent in CRS datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel data augmentation framework that first leverages an LLM-based semantic retriever to identify diverse and semantically relevant items, which are then filtered by a relevance scorer to remove noisy candidates. Building on this, we introduce a two-stage training strategy balancing semantic relevance and collaborative information. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets and user simulators demonstrate significant and consistent performance improvements across various recommenders, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in advancing CRS performance.
title Beyond Single Labels: Improving Conversational Recommendation through LLM-Powered Data Augmentation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05657