CoNRec: Context-Discerning Negative Recommendation with LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Xinda, Wu, Jiawei, Liu, Yishuang, Zhu, Jialin, Xiao, Shuwen, Zheng, Junjun, Kong, Xiangheng, Jiang, Yuning
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Chen, Xinda
Wu, Jiawei
Liu, Yishuang
Zhu, Jialin
Xiao, Shuwen
Zheng, Junjun
Kong, Xiangheng
Jiang, Yuning
author_facet Chen, Xinda
Wu, Jiawei
Liu, Yishuang
Zhu, Jialin
Xiao, Shuwen
Zheng, Junjun
Kong, Xiangheng
Jiang, Yuning
contents Understanding what users like is relatively straightforward; understanding what users dislike, however, remains a challenging and underexplored problem. Research into users' negative preferences has gained increasing importance in modern recommendation systems. Numerous platforms have introduced explicit negative feedback mechanisms and leverage such signals to refine their recommendation models. Beyond traditional business metrics, user experience-driven metrics, such as negative feedback rates, have become critical indicators for evaluating system performance. However, most existing approaches primarily use negative feedback as an auxiliary signal to enhance positive recommendations, paying little attention to directly modeling negative interests, which can be highly valuable in offline applications. Moreover, due to the inherent sparsity of negative feedback data, models often suffer from context understanding biases induced by positive feedback dominance. To address these challenges, we propose the first large language model framework for negative feedback modeling with special designed context-discerning modules. We use semantic ID Representation to replace text-based item descriptions and introduce an item-level alignment task that enhances the LLM's understanding of the semantic context behind negative feedback. Furthermore, we design a Progressive GRPO training paradigm that enables the model to dynamically balance the positive and negative behavioral context utilization. Besides, our investigation further reveals a fundamental misalignment between the conventional next-negative-item prediction objective and users' true negative preferences, which is heavily influenced by the system's recommendation order. To mitigate this, we propose a novel reward function and evaluation metric grounded in multi-day future negative feedback and their collaborative signals.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_15721
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CoNRec: Context-Discerning Negative Recommendation with LLMs
Chen, Xinda
Wu, Jiawei
Liu, Yishuang
Zhu, Jialin
Xiao, Shuwen
Zheng, Junjun
Kong, Xiangheng
Jiang, Yuning
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Understanding what users like is relatively straightforward; understanding what users dislike, however, remains a challenging and underexplored problem. Research into users' negative preferences has gained increasing importance in modern recommendation systems. Numerous platforms have introduced explicit negative feedback mechanisms and leverage such signals to refine their recommendation models. Beyond traditional business metrics, user experience-driven metrics, such as negative feedback rates, have become critical indicators for evaluating system performance. However, most existing approaches primarily use negative feedback as an auxiliary signal to enhance positive recommendations, paying little attention to directly modeling negative interests, which can be highly valuable in offline applications. Moreover, due to the inherent sparsity of negative feedback data, models often suffer from context understanding biases induced by positive feedback dominance. To address these challenges, we propose the first large language model framework for negative feedback modeling with special designed context-discerning modules. We use semantic ID Representation to replace text-based item descriptions and introduce an item-level alignment task that enhances the LLM's understanding of the semantic context behind negative feedback. Furthermore, we design a Progressive GRPO training paradigm that enables the model to dynamically balance the positive and negative behavioral context utilization. Besides, our investigation further reveals a fundamental misalignment between the conventional next-negative-item prediction objective and users' true negative preferences, which is heavily influenced by the system's recommendation order. To mitigate this, we propose a novel reward function and evaluation metric grounded in multi-day future negative feedback and their collaborative signals.
title CoNRec: Context-Discerning Negative Recommendation with LLMs
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15721