GenRecEdit: Adapting Model Editing for Generative Recommendation with Cold-Start Items

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Hauptverfasser: Shen, Chenglei, Shi, Teng, Yu, Weijie, Zhang, Xiao, Xu, Jun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Shen, Chenglei
Shi, Teng
Yu, Weijie
Zhang, Xiao
Xu, Jun
author_facet Shen, Chenglei
Shi, Teng
Yu, Weijie
Zhang, Xiao
Xu, Jun
contents Generative recommendation (GR) has shown strong potential for sequential recommendation in an end-to-end generation paradigm. However, existing GR models suffer from severe cold-start collapse: their recommendation accuracy on cold-start items can drop to near zero. Current solutions typically rely on retraining with cold-start interactions, which is hindered by sparse feedback, high computational cost, and delayed updates, limiting practical utility in rapidly evolving recommendation catalogs. Inspired by model editing in NLP, which enables training-free knowledge injection into large language models, we explore how to bring this paradigm to generative recommendation. This, however, faces two key challenges: GR lacks the explicit subject-object binding common in natural language, making targeted edits difficult; and GR does not exhibit stable token co-occurrence patterns, making the injection of multi-token item representations unreliable. To address these challenges, we propose GenRecEdit, a model editing framework tailored for generative recommendation. GenRecEdit explicitly models the relationship between the full sequence context and next-token generation, adopts iterative token-level editing to inject multi-token item representations, and introduces a one-to-one trigger mechanism to reduce interference among multiple edits during inference. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that GenRecEdit substantially improves recommendation performance on cold-start items while preserving the model's original recommendation quality. Moreover, it achieves these gains using only about 9.5% of the training time required for retraining, enabling more efficient and frequent model updates.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14259
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GenRecEdit: Adapting Model Editing for Generative Recommendation with Cold-Start Items
Shen, Chenglei
Shi, Teng
Yu, Weijie
Zhang, Xiao
Xu, Jun
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Generative recommendation (GR) has shown strong potential for sequential recommendation in an end-to-end generation paradigm. However, existing GR models suffer from severe cold-start collapse: their recommendation accuracy on cold-start items can drop to near zero. Current solutions typically rely on retraining with cold-start interactions, which is hindered by sparse feedback, high computational cost, and delayed updates, limiting practical utility in rapidly evolving recommendation catalogs. Inspired by model editing in NLP, which enables training-free knowledge injection into large language models, we explore how to bring this paradigm to generative recommendation. This, however, faces two key challenges: GR lacks the explicit subject-object binding common in natural language, making targeted edits difficult; and GR does not exhibit stable token co-occurrence patterns, making the injection of multi-token item representations unreliable. To address these challenges, we propose GenRecEdit, a model editing framework tailored for generative recommendation. GenRecEdit explicitly models the relationship between the full sequence context and next-token generation, adopts iterative token-level editing to inject multi-token item representations, and introduces a one-to-one trigger mechanism to reduce interference among multiple edits during inference. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that GenRecEdit substantially improves recommendation performance on cold-start items while preserving the model's original recommendation quality. Moreover, it achieves these gains using only about 9.5% of the training time required for retraining, enabling more efficient and frequent model updates.
title GenRecEdit: Adapting Model Editing for Generative Recommendation with Cold-Start Items
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14259