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1. Inductive generative recommendation via retrieval-based speculation

   Ding, Y; Li, J; McAuley, J; Hou, Y (January 2026, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI))

   Jenkins, C; Taylor, M (Ed.)

   Generative recommendation (GR) is an emerging paradigm that tokenizes items into discrete tokens and learns to autoregressively generate the next tokens as predictions. While this token-generation paradigm is expected to surpass traditional transductive methods, potentially generating new items directly based on semantics, we empirically show that GR models predominantly generate items seen during training and struggle to recommend unseen items. In this paper, we propose SpecGR, a plug-and-play framework that enables GR models to recommend new items in an inductive setting. SpecGR uses a drafter model with inductive capability to propose candidate items, which may include both existing items and new items. The GR model then acts as a verifier, accepting or rejecting candidates while retaining its strong ranking capabilities. We further introduce the guided re-drafting technique to make the proposed candidates more aligned with the outputs of generative recommendation models, improving verification efficiency. We consider two variants for drafting: (1) using an auxiliary drafter model for better flexibility, or (2) leveraging the GR model’s own encoder for parameterefficient self-drafting. Extensive experiments on three realworld datasets demonstrate that SpecGR exhibits both strong inductive recommendation ability and the best overall performance among the compared methods. 

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2. Collaborative Large Language Model for Recommender Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3589334.3645347  

   Zhu, Yaochen; Wu, Liang; Guo, Qi; Hong, Liangjie; Li, Jundong (May 2024, Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2024)

   Recently, there has been growing interest in developing the next-generation recommender systems (RSs) based on pretrained large language models (LLMs). However, the semantic gap between natural language and recommendation tasks is still not well addressed, leading to multiple issues such as spuriously correlated user/item descriptors, ineffective language modeling on user/item data, inefficient recommendations via auto-regression, etc. In this paper, we propose CLLM4Rec, the first generative RS that tightly integrates the LLM paradigm and ID paradigm of RSs, aiming to address the above challenges simultaneously. We first extend the vocabulary of pretrained LLMs with user/item ID tokens to faithfully model user/item collaborative and content semantics. Accordingly, a novel soft+hard prompting strategy is proposed to effectively learn user/item collaborative/content token embeddings via language modeling on RS-specific corpora, where each document is split into a prompt consisting of heterogeneous soft (user/item) tokens and hard (vocab) tokens and a main text consisting of homogeneous item tokens or vocab tokens to facilitate stable and effective language modeling. In addition, a novel mutual regularization strategy is introduced to encourage CLLM4Rec to capture recommendation-related information from noisy user/item content. Finally, we propose a novel recommendation-oriented finetuning strategy for CLLM4Rec, where an item prediction head with multinomial likelihood is added to the pretrained CLLM4Rec backbone to predict hold-out items based on soft+hard prompts established from masked user-item interaction history, where recommendations of multiple items can be generated efficiently without hallucination. 

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3. Inductive Contextual Relation Learning for Personalization

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3450353  

   Zhang, Chuxu; Yao, Huaxiu; Yu, Lu; Huang, Chao; Song, Dongjin; Chen, Haifeng; Jiang, Meng; Chawla, Nitesh V. (May 2021, ACM Transactions on Information Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Web personalization, e.g., recommendation or relevance search, tailoring a service/product to accommodate specific online users, is becoming increasingly important. Inductive personalization aims to infer the relations between existing entities and unseen new ones, e.g., searching relevant authors for new papers or recommending new items to users. This problem, however, is challenging since most of recent studies focus on transductive problem for existing entities. In addition, despite some inductive learning approaches have been introduced recently, their performance is sub-optimal due to relatively simple and inflexible architectures for aggregating entity’s content. To this end, we propose the inductive contextual personalization (ICP) framework through contextual relation learning. Specifically, we first formulate the pairwise relations between entities with a ranking optimization scheme that employs neural aggregator to fuse entity’s heterogeneous contents. Next, we introduce a node embedding term to capture entity’s contextual relations, as a smoothness constraint over the prior ranking objective. Finally, the gradient descent procedure with adaptive negative sampling is employed to learn the model parameters. The learned model is capable of inferring the relations between existing entities and inductive ones. Thorough experiments demonstrate that ICP outperforms numerous baseline methods for two different applications, i.e., relevant author search and new item recommendation. 

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4. DiPS: Differentiable Policy for Sketching in Recommender Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i6.20625  

   Ghosh, Aritra; Mitra, Saayan; Lan, Andrew (June 2022, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   In sequential recommender system applications, it is important to develop models that can capture users' evolving interest over time to successfully recommend future items that they are likely to interact with. For users with long histories, typical models based on recurrent neural networks tend to forget important items in the distant past. Recent works have shown that storing a small sketch of past items can improve sequential recommendation tasks. However, these works all rely on static sketching policies, i.e., heuristics to select items to keep in the sketch, which are not necessarily optimal and cannot improve over time with more training data. In this paper, we propose a differentiable policy for sketching (DiPS), a framework that learns a data-driven sketching policy in an end-to-end manner together with the recommender system model to explicitly maximize recommendation quality in the future. We also propose an approximate estimator of the gradient for optimizing the sketching algorithm parameters that is computationally efficient. We verify the effectiveness of DiPS on real-world datasets under various practical settings and show that it requires up to 50% fewer sketch items to reach the same predictive quality than existing sketching policies. 

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5. DiPS: Differentiable Policy for Sketching in Recommender Systems

   Aritra Ghosh, Saayan Mitra (February 2022, AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI))

   In sequential recommender system applications, it is important to develop models that can capture users’ evolving interest over time to successfully recommend future items that they are likely to interact with. For users with long histories, typical models based on recurrent neural networks tend to forget important items in the distant past. Recent works have shown that storing a small sketch of past items can improve sequential recommendation tasks. However, these works all rely on static sketching policies, i.e., heuristics to select items to keep in the sketch, which are not necessarily optimal and cannot improve over time with more training data. In this paper, we propose a differentiable policy for sketching (DiPS), a framework that learns a data-driven sketching policy in an end-to-end manner together with the recommender system model to explicitly maximize recommendation quality in the future. We also propose an approximate estimator of the gradient for optimizing the sketching algorithm parameters that is computationally efficient. We verify the effectiveness of DiPS on real-world datasets under various practical settings and show that it requires up to 50% fewer sketch items to reach the same predictive quality than existing sketching policies. 

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