Don't Waste It: Guiding Generative Recommenders with Structured Human Priors via Multi-Head Decoding

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Yunkai, Zhang, Qiang, Lin, Feng, Qiu, Ruizhong, Yu, Hanchao, Liu, Jiayi, Xia, Yinglong, Zhang, Benyu, Zheng, Zeyu, Yang, Diji
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Yunkai
Zhang, Qiang
Lin, Feng
Qiu, Ruizhong
Yu, Hanchao
Liu, Jiayi
Xia, Yinglong
Zhang, Benyu
Zheng, Zeyu
Yang, Diji
author_facet Zhang, Yunkai
Zhang, Qiang
Lin, Feng
Qiu, Ruizhong
Yu, Hanchao
Liu, Jiayi
Xia, Yinglong
Zhang, Benyu
Zheng, Zeyu
Yang, Diji
contents Optimizing recommender systems for objectives beyond accuracy, such as diversity, novelty, and personalization, is crucial for long-term user satisfaction. To this end, industrial practitioners have accumulated vast amounts of structured domain knowledge, which we term human priors (e.g., item taxonomies, temporal patterns). This knowledge is typically applied through post-hoc adjustments during ranking or post-ranking. However, this approach remains decoupled from the core model learning, which is particularly undesirable as the industry shifts to end-to-end generative recommendation foundation models. On the other hand, many methods targeting these beyond-accuracy objectives often require architecture-specific modifications and discard these valuable human priors by learning user intent in a fully unsupervised manner. Instead of discarding the human priors accumulated over years of practice, we introduce a backbone-agnostic framework that seamlessly integrates these human priors directly into the end-to-end training of generative recommenders. With lightweight, prior-conditioned adapter heads inspired by efficient LLM decoding strategies, our approach guides the model to disentangle user intent along human-understandable axes (e.g., interaction types, long- vs. short-term interests). We also introduce a hierarchical composition strategy for modeling complex interactions across different prior types. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets demonstrate that our method significantly enhances both accuracy and beyond-accuracy objectives. We also show that human priors allow the backbone model to more effectively leverage longer context lengths and larger model sizes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_10492
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Don't Waste It: Guiding Generative Recommenders with Structured Human Priors via Multi-Head Decoding
Zhang, Yunkai
Zhang, Qiang
Lin, Feng
Qiu, Ruizhong
Yu, Hanchao
Liu, Jiayi
Xia, Yinglong
Zhang, Benyu
Zheng, Zeyu
Yang, Diji
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Optimizing recommender systems for objectives beyond accuracy, such as diversity, novelty, and personalization, is crucial for long-term user satisfaction. To this end, industrial practitioners have accumulated vast amounts of structured domain knowledge, which we term human priors (e.g., item taxonomies, temporal patterns). This knowledge is typically applied through post-hoc adjustments during ranking or post-ranking. However, this approach remains decoupled from the core model learning, which is particularly undesirable as the industry shifts to end-to-end generative recommendation foundation models. On the other hand, many methods targeting these beyond-accuracy objectives often require architecture-specific modifications and discard these valuable human priors by learning user intent in a fully unsupervised manner. Instead of discarding the human priors accumulated over years of practice, we introduce a backbone-agnostic framework that seamlessly integrates these human priors directly into the end-to-end training of generative recommenders. With lightweight, prior-conditioned adapter heads inspired by efficient LLM decoding strategies, our approach guides the model to disentangle user intent along human-understandable axes (e.g., interaction types, long- vs. short-term interests). We also introduce a hierarchical composition strategy for modeling complex interactions across different prior types. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets demonstrate that our method significantly enhances both accuracy and beyond-accuracy objectives. We also show that human priors allow the backbone model to more effectively leverage longer context lengths and larger model sizes.
title Don't Waste It: Guiding Generative Recommenders with Structured Human Priors via Multi-Head Decoding
topic Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10492