Customized Retrieval-Augmented Generation with LLM for Debiasing Recommendation Unlearning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Haichao, Zhang, Chong, Hu, Peiyu, Qiu, Shi, Wang, Jia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Haichao
Zhang, Chong
Hu, Peiyu
Qiu, Shi
Wang, Jia
author_facet Zhang, Haichao
Zhang, Chong
Hu, Peiyu
Qiu, Shi
Wang, Jia
contents Modern recommender systems face a critical challenge in complying with privacy regulations like the 'right to be forgotten': removing a user's data without disrupting recommendations for others. Traditional unlearning methods address this by partial model updates, but introduce propagation bias--where unlearning one user's data distorts recommendations for behaviorally similar users, degrading system accuracy. While retraining eliminates bias, it is computationally prohibitive for large-scale systems. To address this challenge, we propose CRAGRU, a novel framework leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for efficient, user-specific unlearning that mitigates bias while preserving recommendation quality. CRAGRU decouples unlearning into distinct retrieval and generation stages. In retrieval, we employ three tailored strategies designed to precisely isolate the target user's data influence, minimizing collateral impact on unrelated users and enhancing unlearning efficiency. Subsequently, the generation stage utilizes an LLM, augmented with user profiles integrated into prompts, to reconstruct accurate and personalized recommendations without needing to retrain the entire base model. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that CRAGRU effectively unlearns targeted user data, significantly mitigating unlearning bias by preventing adverse impacts on non-target users, while maintaining recommendation performance comparable to fully trained original models. Our work highlights the promise of RAG-based architectures for building robust and privacy-preserving recommender systems. The source code is available at: https://github.com/zhanghaichao520/LLM_rec_unlearning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_05494
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Customized Retrieval-Augmented Generation with LLM for Debiasing Recommendation Unlearning
Zhang, Haichao
Zhang, Chong
Hu, Peiyu
Qiu, Shi
Wang, Jia
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Modern recommender systems face a critical challenge in complying with privacy regulations like the 'right to be forgotten': removing a user's data without disrupting recommendations for others. Traditional unlearning methods address this by partial model updates, but introduce propagation bias--where unlearning one user's data distorts recommendations for behaviorally similar users, degrading system accuracy. While retraining eliminates bias, it is computationally prohibitive for large-scale systems. To address this challenge, we propose CRAGRU, a novel framework leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for efficient, user-specific unlearning that mitigates bias while preserving recommendation quality. CRAGRU decouples unlearning into distinct retrieval and generation stages. In retrieval, we employ three tailored strategies designed to precisely isolate the target user's data influence, minimizing collateral impact on unrelated users and enhancing unlearning efficiency. Subsequently, the generation stage utilizes an LLM, augmented with user profiles integrated into prompts, to reconstruct accurate and personalized recommendations without needing to retrain the entire base model. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that CRAGRU effectively unlearns targeted user data, significantly mitigating unlearning bias by preventing adverse impacts on non-target users, while maintaining recommendation performance comparable to fully trained original models. Our work highlights the promise of RAG-based architectures for building robust and privacy-preserving recommender systems. The source code is available at: https://github.com/zhanghaichao520/LLM_rec_unlearning.
title Customized Retrieval-Augmented Generation with LLM for Debiasing Recommendation Unlearning
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05494