LLM Reasoning for Cold-Start Item Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Li, Shijun, Wang, Yu, Wang, Jin, Li, Ying, Ghosh, Joydeep, Cocos, Anne
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Li, Shijun
Wang, Yu
Wang, Jin
Li, Ying
Ghosh, Joydeep
Cocos, Anne
author_facet Li, Shijun
Wang, Yu
Wang, Jin
Li, Ying
Ghosh, Joydeep
Cocos, Anne
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential for improving recommendation systems through their inherent reasoning capabilities and extensive knowledge base. Yet, existing studies predominantly address warm-start scenarios with abundant user-item interaction data, leaving the more challenging cold-start scenarios, where sparse interactions hinder traditional collaborative filtering methods, underexplored. To address this limitation, we propose novel reasoning strategies designed for cold-start item recommendations within the Netflix domain. Our method utilizes the advanced reasoning capabilities of LLMs to effectively infer user preferences, particularly for newly introduced or rarely interacted items. We systematically evaluate supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning, and hybrid approaches that combine both methods to optimize recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate significant improvements in both methodological efficacy and practical performance in cold-start recommendation contexts. Remarkably, our reasoning-based fine-tuned models outperform Netflix's production ranking model by up to 8% in certain cases.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18261
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM Reasoning for Cold-Start Item Recommendation
Li, Shijun
Wang, Yu
Wang, Jin
Li, Ying
Ghosh, Joydeep
Cocos, Anne
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
H.3.3; I.2.7; I.2.6
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential for improving recommendation systems through their inherent reasoning capabilities and extensive knowledge base. Yet, existing studies predominantly address warm-start scenarios with abundant user-item interaction data, leaving the more challenging cold-start scenarios, where sparse interactions hinder traditional collaborative filtering methods, underexplored. To address this limitation, we propose novel reasoning strategies designed for cold-start item recommendations within the Netflix domain. Our method utilizes the advanced reasoning capabilities of LLMs to effectively infer user preferences, particularly for newly introduced or rarely interacted items. We systematically evaluate supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning, and hybrid approaches that combine both methods to optimize recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate significant improvements in both methodological efficacy and practical performance in cold-start recommendation contexts. Remarkably, our reasoning-based fine-tuned models outperform Netflix's production ranking model by up to 8% in certain cases.
title LLM Reasoning for Cold-Start Item Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
H.3.3; I.2.7; I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18261