arXiv:2503.22675cs.IRcs.AI2025-03被引 95

让推荐系统在推理时多思考几步,显著提升长尾物品推荐效果。

Think Before Recommend: Unleashing the Latent Reasoning Power for Sequential Recommendation

  • 推理时通过多步自回归生成用户偏好,打破传统单次编码限制。
  • 在多个数据集上使主流推荐模型性能提升30%-50%。
  • 适合追求高精度推荐、关注长尾物品的工业级系统开发者。

序列推荐(SeqRec)旨在通过用户历史交互序列预测下一个物品,在众多实际推荐系统中扮演关键角色。然而,现有方法普遍采用直接前向计算范式,仅用序列编码器的最终隐藏状态作为用户表征。我们指出,这种推理范式因计算深度有限,难以捕捉用户偏好的复杂演化过程,且对长尾物品理解不足,导致性能受限。为此,我们提出ReaRec——首个面向推荐系统的推理时计算框架,通过隐式多步推理增强用户表征。具体而言,ReaRec将序列的最后隐藏状态自回归地输入推荐模型,并引入特殊的推理位置嵌入,分离原始物品编码空间与多步推理空间。此外,我们设计了两种轻量级推理学习方法:集成推理学习(ERL)和渐进推理学习(PRL),以更有效地挖掘ReaRec的推理潜力。在五个公开真实世界数据集及多种SeqRec架构上的大量实验表明,ReaRec具有普适性与高效性。值得注意的是,后验分析显示,ReaRec可将多个主流序列表示模型的性能上限提升约30%-50%。我们认为此项工作为未来推理时计算在序列推荐中的研究开辟了全新且有前景的方向。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Sequential Recommendation (SeqRec) aims to predict the next item by capturing sequential patterns from users' historical interactions, playing a crucial role in many real-world recommender systems. However, existing approaches predominantly adopt a direct forward computation paradigm, where the final hidden state of the sequence encoder serves as the user representation. We argue that this inference paradigm, due to its limited computational depth, struggles to model the complex evolving nature of user preferences and lacks a nuanced understanding of long-tail items, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{ReaRec}, the first inference-time computing framework for recommender systems, which enhances user representations through implicit multi-step reasoning. Specifically, ReaRec autoregressively feeds the sequence's last hidden state into the sequential recommender while incorporating special reasoning position embeddings to decouple the original item encoding space from the multi-step reasoning space. Moreover, we introduce two lightweight reasoning-based learning methods, Ensemble Reasoning Learning (ERL) and Progressive Reasoning Learning (PRL), to further effectively exploit ReaRec's reasoning potential. Extensive experiments on five public real-world datasets and different SeqRec architectures demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our proposed ReaRec. Remarkably, post-hoc analyses reveal that ReaRec significantly elevates the performance ceiling of multiple sequential recommendation backbones by approximately 30\%-50\%. Thus, we believe this work can open a new and promising avenue for future research in inference-time computing for sequential recommendation.

序列推荐推理增强长尾物品多步思考

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