Bringing Reasoning to Generative Recommendation Through the Lens of Cascaded Ranking

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lin, Xinyu, Liu, Pengyuan, Wang, Wenjie, Hu, Yicheng, Xu, Chen, Feng, Fuli, Wang, Qifan, Chua, Tat-Seng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917246845059072
author Lin, Xinyu
Liu, Pengyuan
Wang, Wenjie
Hu, Yicheng
Xu, Chen
Feng, Fuli
Wang, Qifan
Chua, Tat-Seng
author_facet Lin, Xinyu
Liu, Pengyuan
Wang, Wenjie
Hu, Yicheng
Xu, Chen
Feng, Fuli
Wang, Qifan
Chua, Tat-Seng
contents Generative Recommendation (GR) has become a promising end-to-end approach with high FLOPS utilization for resource-efficient recommendation. Despite the effectiveness, we show that current GR models suffer from a critical \textbf{bias amplification} issue, where token-level bias escalates as token generation progresses, ultimately limiting the recommendation diversity and hurting the user experience. By comparing against the key factor behind the success of traditional multi-stage pipelines, we reveal two limitations in GR that can amplify the bias: homogeneous reliance on the encoded history, and fixed computational budgets that prevent deeper user preference understanding. To combat the bias amplification issue, it is crucial for GR to 1) incorporate more heterogeneous information, and 2) allocate greater computational resources at each token generation step. To this end, we propose CARE, a simple yet effective cascaded reasoning framework for debiased GR. To incorporate heterogeneous information, we introduce a progressive history encoding mechanism, which progressively incorporates increasingly fine-grained history information as the generation process advances. To allocate more computations, we propose a query-anchored reasoning mechanism, which seeks to perform a deeper understanding of historical information through parallel reasoning steps. We instantiate CARE on three GR backbones. Empirical results on four datasets show the superiority of CARE in recommendation accuracy, diversity, efficiency, and promising scalability. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/Linxyhaha/CARE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_03692
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bringing Reasoning to Generative Recommendation Through the Lens of Cascaded Ranking
Lin, Xinyu
Liu, Pengyuan
Wang, Wenjie
Hu, Yicheng
Xu, Chen
Feng, Fuli
Wang, Qifan
Chua, Tat-Seng
Information Retrieval
Generative Recommendation (GR) has become a promising end-to-end approach with high FLOPS utilization for resource-efficient recommendation. Despite the effectiveness, we show that current GR models suffer from a critical \textbf{bias amplification} issue, where token-level bias escalates as token generation progresses, ultimately limiting the recommendation diversity and hurting the user experience. By comparing against the key factor behind the success of traditional multi-stage pipelines, we reveal two limitations in GR that can amplify the bias: homogeneous reliance on the encoded history, and fixed computational budgets that prevent deeper user preference understanding. To combat the bias amplification issue, it is crucial for GR to 1) incorporate more heterogeneous information, and 2) allocate greater computational resources at each token generation step. To this end, we propose CARE, a simple yet effective cascaded reasoning framework for debiased GR. To incorporate heterogeneous information, we introduce a progressive history encoding mechanism, which progressively incorporates increasingly fine-grained history information as the generation process advances. To allocate more computations, we propose a query-anchored reasoning mechanism, which seeks to perform a deeper understanding of historical information through parallel reasoning steps. We instantiate CARE on three GR backbones. Empirical results on four datasets show the superiority of CARE in recommendation accuracy, diversity, efficiency, and promising scalability. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/Linxyhaha/CARE.
title Bringing Reasoning to Generative Recommendation Through the Lens of Cascaded Ranking
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03692