PixRec: Leveraging Visual Context for Next-Item Prediction in Sequential Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Chakrabarty, Sayak, Pal, Souradip
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Chakrabarty, Sayak
Pal, Souradip
author_facet Chakrabarty, Sayak
Pal, Souradip
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown strong potential for usage in sequential recommendation tasks through text-only models, which combine advanced prompt design, contrastive alignment, and fine-tuning on downstream domain-specific data. While effective, these approaches overlook the rich visual information present in many real-world recommendation scenarios, particularly in e-commerce. This paper proposes PixRec - a vision-language framework that incorporates both textual attributes and product images into the recommendation pipeline. Our architecture leverages a vision-language model backbone capable of jointly processing image-text sequences, maintaining a dual-tower structure and mixed training objective while aligning multi-modal feature projections for both item-item and user-item interactions. Using the Amazon Reviews dataset augmented with product images, our experiments demonstrate $3\times$ and 40% improvements in top-rank and top-10 rank accuracy over text-only recommenders respectively, indicating that visual features can help distinguish items with similar textual descriptions. Our work outlines future directions for scaling multi-modal recommenders training, enhancing visual-text feature fusion, and evaluating inference-time performance. This work takes a step toward building software systems utilizing visual information in sequential recommendation for real-world applications like e-commerce.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_06458
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PixRec: Leveraging Visual Context for Next-Item Prediction in Sequential Recommendation
Chakrabarty, Sayak
Pal, Souradip
Information Retrieval
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown strong potential for usage in sequential recommendation tasks through text-only models, which combine advanced prompt design, contrastive alignment, and fine-tuning on downstream domain-specific data. While effective, these approaches overlook the rich visual information present in many real-world recommendation scenarios, particularly in e-commerce. This paper proposes PixRec - a vision-language framework that incorporates both textual attributes and product images into the recommendation pipeline. Our architecture leverages a vision-language model backbone capable of jointly processing image-text sequences, maintaining a dual-tower structure and mixed training objective while aligning multi-modal feature projections for both item-item and user-item interactions. Using the Amazon Reviews dataset augmented with product images, our experiments demonstrate $3\times$ and 40% improvements in top-rank and top-10 rank accuracy over text-only recommenders respectively, indicating that visual features can help distinguish items with similar textual descriptions. Our work outlines future directions for scaling multi-modal recommenders training, enhancing visual-text feature fusion, and evaluating inference-time performance. This work takes a step toward building software systems utilizing visual information in sequential recommendation for real-world applications like e-commerce.
title PixRec: Leveraging Visual Context for Next-Item Prediction in Sequential Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06458