Effectiveness of LLMs in Temporal User Profiling for Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sabouri, Milad, Mansoury, Masoud, Lin, Kun, Mobasher, Bamshad
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Sabouri, Milad
Mansoury, Masoud
Lin, Kun
Mobasher, Bamshad
author_facet Sabouri, Milad
Mansoury, Masoud
Lin, Kun
Mobasher, Bamshad
contents Effectively modeling the dynamic nature of user preferences is crucial for enhancing recommendation accuracy and fostering transparency in recommender systems. Traditional user profiling often overlooks the distinction between transitory short-term interests and stable long-term preferences. This paper examines the capability of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to capture these temporal dynamics, generating richer user representations through distinct short-term and long-term textual summaries of interaction histories. Our observations suggest that while LLMs tend to improve recommendation quality in domains with more active user engagement, their benefits appear less pronounced in sparser environments. This disparity likely stems from the varying distinguishability of short-term and long-term preferences across domains; the approach shows greater utility where these temporal interests are more clearly separable (e.g., Movies\&TV) compared to domains with more stable user profiles (e.g., Video Games). This highlights a critical trade-off between enhanced performance and computational costs, suggesting context-dependent LLM application. Beyond predictive capability, this LLM-driven approach inherently provides an intrinsic potential for interpretability through its natural language profiles and attention weights. This work contributes insights into the practical capability and inherent interpretability of LLM-driven temporal user profiling, outlining new research directions for developing adaptive and transparent recommender systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_00176
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Effectiveness of LLMs in Temporal User Profiling for Recommendation
Sabouri, Milad
Mansoury, Masoud
Lin, Kun
Mobasher, Bamshad
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Effectively modeling the dynamic nature of user preferences is crucial for enhancing recommendation accuracy and fostering transparency in recommender systems. Traditional user profiling often overlooks the distinction between transitory short-term interests and stable long-term preferences. This paper examines the capability of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to capture these temporal dynamics, generating richer user representations through distinct short-term and long-term textual summaries of interaction histories. Our observations suggest that while LLMs tend to improve recommendation quality in domains with more active user engagement, their benefits appear less pronounced in sparser environments. This disparity likely stems from the varying distinguishability of short-term and long-term preferences across domains; the approach shows greater utility where these temporal interests are more clearly separable (e.g., Movies\&TV) compared to domains with more stable user profiles (e.g., Video Games). This highlights a critical trade-off between enhanced performance and computational costs, suggesting context-dependent LLM application. Beyond predictive capability, this LLM-driven approach inherently provides an intrinsic potential for interpretability through its natural language profiles and attention weights. This work contributes insights into the practical capability and inherent interpretability of LLM-driven temporal user profiling, outlining new research directions for developing adaptive and transparent recommender systems.
title Effectiveness of LLMs in Temporal User Profiling for Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00176