针对大模型推荐系统尾部物品表现差的问题,提出自适应优化方法提升长尾推荐效果。
Taming the Long Tail: Efficient Item-wise Sharpness-Aware Minimization for LLM-based Recommender Systems
- 在物品层面设计细粒度尖锐度正则化,动态调整损失曲面改善长尾物品学习
- 在三个真实数据集上显著提升尾部物品推荐准确率,整体性能不受影响
- 首次系统解决大模型推荐中的长尾问题,适合关注推荐公平性与长尾挖掘的研究者
基于大语言模型的推荐系统(LRS)虽具备强知识利用和指令遵循能力,但长期存在的长尾问题尚未被系统研究。本文实证发现LRS面临两类长尾:一是预训练语料隐含的先验长尾,二是推荐数据分布偏斜导致的数据长尾。两者叠加使头部物品表现更优,尤其在交集区域头效应更强。然而,整体性能仍主要受数据长尾主导。为此,提出高效物品级尖锐度感知最小化(EISAM),通过自适应正则化物品级损失曲面,提升尾部物品表现。EISAM采用高效惩罚设计,兼顾细粒度物品特异性与大模型计算可扩展性,并推导出泛化误差界,证明其理论优势。大量实验表明,EISAM显著提升尾部物品推荐性能,同时保持整体质量,成为首个系统解决LRS长尾问题的方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Model-based Recommender Systems (LRSs) have recently emerged as a new paradigm in sequential recommendation by directly adopting LLMs as backbones. While LRSs demonstrate strong knowledge utilization and instruction-following abilities, they have not been systematically studied under the long-standing long-tail problem. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study and reveal that LRSs face two distinct types of long-tail: i) prior long-tail, inherited implicitly from pretraining corpora, and ii) data long-tail, originating from skewed recommendation datasets. Our analysis shows that both contribute to the performance disparity between head and tail items, with the intersection of the two heads exhibiting an even stronger head effect. Nevertheless, the overall performance distribution in LRSs, especially on the tail, remains dominated by the data long-tail. To address this challenge, we propose Efficient Item-wise Sharpness-Aware Minimization (EISAM), a novel optimization framework that improves tail-item performance by adaptively regularizing the loss landscape at the item level. EISAM introduces an efficient penalty design that captures fine-grained item-specific sharpness while maintaining computational scalability for LLMs. In addition, we derive a generalization bound for EISAM. Our theoretical analysis shows that the bound decreases at a faster rate under our item-wise regularization, offering theoretical support for its effectiveness. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that EISAM significantly boosts tail-item recommendation performance while preserving overall quality, establishing the first systematic solution to the long-tail problem in LRSs.
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