The Best of the Two Worlds: Harmonizing Semantic and Hash IDs for Sequential Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Ziwei, Wang, Yejing, Wang, Wanyu, Zejian, Wang, Liu, Qidong, Zhang, Zijian, Chen, Chong, Huang, Wei, Zhao, Xiangyu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Liu, Ziwei
Wang, Yejing
Wang, Wanyu
Zejian, Wang
Liu, Qidong
Zhang, Zijian
Chen, Chong
Huang, Wei
Zhao, Xiangyu
author_facet Liu, Ziwei
Wang, Yejing
Wang, Wanyu
Zejian, Wang
Liu, Qidong
Zhang, Zijian
Chen, Chong
Huang, Wei
Zhao, Xiangyu
contents Conventional Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS) typically assign unique hash IDs (HID) to construct item embeddings, which mainly capture collaborative signals from historical user-item interactions. However, such embeddings are vulnerable in long-tail scenarios where most items are rarely consumed. Recent methods that incorporate auxiliary information often face noisy collaborative sharing from co-occurrence signals or semantic homogeneity caused by flat dense embeddings. In contrast, Semantic IDs (SID), with their support for code sharing and multi-granular semantic modeling, offer a promising alternative. Nevertheless, SID-based methods are hindered by a collaborative overwhelming phenomenon: commonly adopted quantization mechanisms compromise the identifier uniqueness needed to model head items, resulting in a performance trade-off between head and tail items. To address this challenge, we propose H2Rec, a novel framework that harmonizes SID and HID. We design a dual-branch modeling architecture that simultaneously captures the multi-granular semantics of SID while preserving the unique collaborative identity provided by HID. Moreover, we introduce a dual-level alignment strategy to bridge the two representations, enabling effective knowledge transfer and robust preference modeling. Extensive offline experiments on three public benchmarks and online experiments on a large-scale commercial platform demonstrate that H2Rec achieves a better balance between head and tail recommendation quality and consistently outperforms existing baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_10388
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Best of the Two Worlds: Harmonizing Semantic and Hash IDs for Sequential Recommendation
Liu, Ziwei
Wang, Yejing
Wang, Wanyu
Zejian, Wang
Liu, Qidong
Zhang, Zijian
Chen, Chong
Huang, Wei
Zhao, Xiangyu
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Conventional Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS) typically assign unique hash IDs (HID) to construct item embeddings, which mainly capture collaborative signals from historical user-item interactions. However, such embeddings are vulnerable in long-tail scenarios where most items are rarely consumed. Recent methods that incorporate auxiliary information often face noisy collaborative sharing from co-occurrence signals or semantic homogeneity caused by flat dense embeddings. In contrast, Semantic IDs (SID), with their support for code sharing and multi-granular semantic modeling, offer a promising alternative. Nevertheless, SID-based methods are hindered by a collaborative overwhelming phenomenon: commonly adopted quantization mechanisms compromise the identifier uniqueness needed to model head items, resulting in a performance trade-off between head and tail items. To address this challenge, we propose H2Rec, a novel framework that harmonizes SID and HID. We design a dual-branch modeling architecture that simultaneously captures the multi-granular semantics of SID while preserving the unique collaborative identity provided by HID. Moreover, we introduce a dual-level alignment strategy to bridge the two representations, enabling effective knowledge transfer and robust preference modeling. Extensive offline experiments on three public benchmarks and online experiments on a large-scale commercial platform demonstrate that H2Rec achieves a better balance between head and tail recommendation quality and consistently outperforms existing baselines.
title The Best of the Two Worlds: Harmonizing Semantic and Hash IDs for Sequential Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10388