Reproducibility Study of "XRec: Large Language Models for Explainable Recommendation"

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Hauptverfasser: Mishra, Ranjan, Bibo, Julian I., van Engelen, Quinten, Schaapman, Henk
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Mishra, Ranjan
Bibo, Julian I.
van Engelen, Quinten
Schaapman, Henk
author_facet Mishra, Ranjan
Bibo, Julian I.
van Engelen, Quinten
Schaapman, Henk
contents In this study, we reproduced the work done in the paper "XRec: Large Language Models for Explainable Recommendation" by Ma et al. (2024). The original authors introduced XRec, a model-agnostic collaborative instruction-tuning framework that enables large language models (LLMs) to provide users with comprehensive explanations of generated recommendations. Our objective was to replicate the results of the original paper, albeit using Llama 3 as the LLM for evaluation instead of GPT-3.5-turbo. We built on the source code provided by Ma et al. (2024) to achieve our goal. Our work extends the original paper by modifying the input embeddings or deleting the output embeddings of XRec's Mixture of Experts module. Based on our results, XRec effectively generates personalized explanations and its stability is improved by incorporating collaborative information. However, XRec did not consistently outperform all baseline models in every metric. Our extended analysis further highlights the importance of the Mixture of Experts embeddings in shaping the explanation structures, showcasing how collaborative signals interact with language modeling. Through our work, we provide an open-source evaluation implementation that enhances accessibility for researchers and practitioners alike. Our complete code repository can be found at https://github.com/julianbibo/xrec-reproducibility.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_06275
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reproducibility Study of "XRec: Large Language Models for Explainable Recommendation"
Mishra, Ranjan
Bibo, Julian I.
van Engelen, Quinten
Schaapman, Henk
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
In this study, we reproduced the work done in the paper "XRec: Large Language Models for Explainable Recommendation" by Ma et al. (2024). The original authors introduced XRec, a model-agnostic collaborative instruction-tuning framework that enables large language models (LLMs) to provide users with comprehensive explanations of generated recommendations. Our objective was to replicate the results of the original paper, albeit using Llama 3 as the LLM for evaluation instead of GPT-3.5-turbo. We built on the source code provided by Ma et al. (2024) to achieve our goal. Our work extends the original paper by modifying the input embeddings or deleting the output embeddings of XRec's Mixture of Experts module. Based on our results, XRec effectively generates personalized explanations and its stability is improved by incorporating collaborative information. However, XRec did not consistently outperform all baseline models in every metric. Our extended analysis further highlights the importance of the Mixture of Experts embeddings in shaping the explanation structures, showcasing how collaborative signals interact with language modeling. Through our work, we provide an open-source evaluation implementation that enhances accessibility for researchers and practitioners alike. Our complete code repository can be found at https://github.com/julianbibo/xrec-reproducibility.
title Reproducibility Study of "XRec: Large Language Models for Explainable Recommendation"
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06275