An item is worth one token in Multimodal Large Language Models-based Sequential Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhong, Qiyong, Su, Jiajie, Yang, Ming, Ma, Yunshan, Zheng, Xiaolin, Chen, Chaochao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhong, Qiyong
Su, Jiajie
Yang, Ming
Ma, Yunshan
Zheng, Xiaolin
Chen, Chaochao
author_facet Zhong, Qiyong
Su, Jiajie
Yang, Ming
Ma, Yunshan
Zheng, Xiaolin
Chen, Chaochao
contents Sequential recommendations (SR) predict users' future interactions based on their historical behavior. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought powerful generative and reasoning capabilities, significantly enhancing SR performance, while Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) further extend this by introducing data like images and interactive relationships. However, critical issues remain, i.e., (a) Suboptimal item representations caused by lengthy and redundant descriptions, leading to inefficiencies in both training and inference; (b) Modality-related cognitive bias, as LLMs are predominantly pretrained on textual data, limiting their ability to effectively integrate and utilize non-textual modalities; (c) Weakening sequential perception in long interaction sequences, where attention mechanisms struggle to capture earlier interactions, hindering the modeling of long-range dependencies. To address these issues, we propose Speeder, an efficient MLLM-based paradigm for SR featuring three key innovations: 1) Multimodal Representation Compression (MRC), which condenses item attributes into concise yet informative tokens, reducing redundancy and computational cost; 2) Modality-aware Progressive Optimization (MPO), enabling gradual learning of multimodal representations; 3) Sequential Position Awareness Enhancement (SPAE), improving the LLM's capability to capture both relative and absolute sequential dependencies in long interaction sequences. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Speeder. Speeder increases training speed to 250% of the original while reducing inference time to 25% on the Amazon dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_05885
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An item is worth one token in Multimodal Large Language Models-based Sequential Recommendation
Zhong, Qiyong
Su, Jiajie
Yang, Ming
Ma, Yunshan
Zheng, Xiaolin
Chen, Chaochao
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Sequential recommendations (SR) predict users' future interactions based on their historical behavior. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought powerful generative and reasoning capabilities, significantly enhancing SR performance, while Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) further extend this by introducing data like images and interactive relationships. However, critical issues remain, i.e., (a) Suboptimal item representations caused by lengthy and redundant descriptions, leading to inefficiencies in both training and inference; (b) Modality-related cognitive bias, as LLMs are predominantly pretrained on textual data, limiting their ability to effectively integrate and utilize non-textual modalities; (c) Weakening sequential perception in long interaction sequences, where attention mechanisms struggle to capture earlier interactions, hindering the modeling of long-range dependencies. To address these issues, we propose Speeder, an efficient MLLM-based paradigm for SR featuring three key innovations: 1) Multimodal Representation Compression (MRC), which condenses item attributes into concise yet informative tokens, reducing redundancy and computational cost; 2) Modality-aware Progressive Optimization (MPO), enabling gradual learning of multimodal representations; 3) Sequential Position Awareness Enhancement (SPAE), improving the LLM's capability to capture both relative and absolute sequential dependencies in long interaction sequences. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Speeder. Speeder increases training speed to 250% of the original while reducing inference time to 25% on the Amazon dataset.
title An item is worth one token in Multimodal Large Language Models-based Sequential Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05885