RCLRec: Reverse Curriculum Learning for Modeling Sparse Conversions in Generative Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Huang, Yulei, Deng, Hao, Xing, Haibo, Hu, Jinxin, Xu, Chuanfei, Chen, Zulong, Zhang, Yu, Zeng, Xiaoyi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917368662327296
author Huang, Yulei
Deng, Hao
Xing, Haibo
Hu, Jinxin
Xu, Chuanfei
Chen, Zulong
Zhang, Yu
Zeng, Xiaoyi
author_facet Huang, Yulei
Deng, Hao
Xing, Haibo
Hu, Jinxin
Xu, Chuanfei
Chen, Zulong
Zhang, Yu
Zeng, Xiaoyi
contents Conversion objectives in large-scale recommender systems are sparse, making them difficult to optimize. Generative recommendation (GR) partially alleviates data sparsity by organizing multi-type behaviors into a unified token sequence with shared representations, but conversion signals remain insufficiently modeled. While recent behavior-aware GR models encode behavior types and employ behavior-aware attention to highlight decision-related intermediate behaviors, they still rely on standard attention over the full history and provide no additional supervision for conversions, leaving conversion sparsity largely unresolved. To address these challenges, we propose RCLRec, a reverse curriculum learning-based GR framework for sparse conversion supervision. For each conversion target, RCLRec constructs a short curriculum by selecting a subsequence of conversion-related items from the history in reverse. Their semantic tokens are fed to the decoder as a prefix, together with the target conversion tokens, under a joint generation objective. This design provides additional instance-specific intermediate supervision, alleviating conversion sparsity and focusing the model on the user's critical decision process. We further introduce a curriculum quality-aware loss to ensure that the selected curricula are informative for conversion prediction. Experiments on offline datasets and an online A/B test show that RCLRec achieves superior performance, with +2.09% advertising revenue and +1.86% orders in online deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_28124
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RCLRec: Reverse Curriculum Learning for Modeling Sparse Conversions in Generative Recommendation
Huang, Yulei
Deng, Hao
Xing, Haibo
Hu, Jinxin
Xu, Chuanfei
Chen, Zulong
Zhang, Yu
Zeng, Xiaoyi
Information Retrieval
Conversion objectives in large-scale recommender systems are sparse, making them difficult to optimize. Generative recommendation (GR) partially alleviates data sparsity by organizing multi-type behaviors into a unified token sequence with shared representations, but conversion signals remain insufficiently modeled. While recent behavior-aware GR models encode behavior types and employ behavior-aware attention to highlight decision-related intermediate behaviors, they still rely on standard attention over the full history and provide no additional supervision for conversions, leaving conversion sparsity largely unresolved. To address these challenges, we propose RCLRec, a reverse curriculum learning-based GR framework for sparse conversion supervision. For each conversion target, RCLRec constructs a short curriculum by selecting a subsequence of conversion-related items from the history in reverse. Their semantic tokens are fed to the decoder as a prefix, together with the target conversion tokens, under a joint generation objective. This design provides additional instance-specific intermediate supervision, alleviating conversion sparsity and focusing the model on the user's critical decision process. We further introduce a curriculum quality-aware loss to ensure that the selected curricula are informative for conversion prediction. Experiments on offline datasets and an online A/B test show that RCLRec achieves superior performance, with +2.09% advertising revenue and +1.86% orders in online deployment.
title RCLRec: Reverse Curriculum Learning for Modeling Sparse Conversions in Generative Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28124