Uncertainty-Aware Semantic Decoding for LLM-Based Sequential Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Yin, Chenke, Fan, Li, Wang, Jia, Hu, Dongxiao, Zhang, Haichao, Zhang, Chong, Xiang, Yang
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Yin, Chenke
Fan, Li
Wang, Jia
Hu, Dongxiao
Zhang, Haichao
Zhang, Chong
Xiang, Yang
author_facet Yin, Chenke
Fan, Li
Wang, Jia
Hu, Dongxiao
Zhang, Haichao
Zhang, Chong
Xiang, Yang
contents Large language models have been widely applied to sequential recommendation tasks, yet during inference, they continue to rely on decoding strategies developed for natural language processing. This creates a mismatch between text-generation objectives and recommendation next item selection objectives. This paper addresses this limitation by proposing an Uncertainty-aware Semantic Decoding (USD) framework that combines logit-based clustering with adaptive scoring to improve next-item predictions. Our approach clusters items with similar logit vectors into semantic equivalence groups, then redistributes probability mass within these clusters and computes entropy across them to control item scoring and sampling temperature during recommendation inference. Experiments on Amazon Product datasets (six domains) gains of 18.5\% in HR@3, 11.9\% in NDCG@3, and 10.8\% in MRR@3 compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Hyperparameter analysis confirms the optimal parameters among various settings, and experiments on H\&M, and Netflix datasets indicate that the framework can adapt to differing recommendation domains. The experimental results confirm that integrating semantic clustering and uncertainty assessment yields more reliable and accurate recommendations.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_07210
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Uncertainty-Aware Semantic Decoding for LLM-Based Sequential Recommendation
Yin, Chenke
Fan, Li
Wang, Jia
Hu, Dongxiao
Zhang, Haichao
Zhang, Chong
Xiang, Yang
Information Retrieval
Large language models have been widely applied to sequential recommendation tasks, yet during inference, they continue to rely on decoding strategies developed for natural language processing. This creates a mismatch between text-generation objectives and recommendation next item selection objectives. This paper addresses this limitation by proposing an Uncertainty-aware Semantic Decoding (USD) framework that combines logit-based clustering with adaptive scoring to improve next-item predictions. Our approach clusters items with similar logit vectors into semantic equivalence groups, then redistributes probability mass within these clusters and computes entropy across them to control item scoring and sampling temperature during recommendation inference. Experiments on Amazon Product datasets (six domains) gains of 18.5\% in HR@3, 11.9\% in NDCG@3, and 10.8\% in MRR@3 compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Hyperparameter analysis confirms the optimal parameters among various settings, and experiments on H\&M, and Netflix datasets indicate that the framework can adapt to differing recommendation domains. The experimental results confirm that integrating semantic clustering and uncertainty assessment yields more reliable and accurate recommendations.
title Uncertainty-Aware Semantic Decoding for LLM-Based Sequential Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07210