新词嵌入初始化方法改进,让语言模型推荐更精准
Grounded Token Initialization for New Vocabulary in LMs for Generative Recommendation
- 用语义关联而非平均值初始化新词嵌入
- 在多个推荐数据集上超越传统初始化方法
- 适合需要扩展词汇的语言模型应用
语言模型在生成式推荐等任务中常引入可学习的新词汇标记(如Semantic-ID)。现有方法通常将新标记初始化为现有词汇嵌入的均值,依赖微调学习其表示。我们通过谱分析与几何诊断发现,这种均值初始化会使所有新标记坍缩至退化子空间,丧失相互区分性,导致微调难以恢复。为此提出「有根基的标记初始化」假设:在微调前,基于配对语言监督将新标记映射到预训练嵌入空间中语义明确且互异的位置。我们设计轻量级方法GTI实现该假设,在多个生成式推荐基准(包括工业级与公开数据集)上表现优于均值初始化及现有辅助任务方法。进一步分析表明,有根基的嵌入能保持更丰富的标记间结构,验证了初始化质量是词汇扩展的关键瓶颈。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Language models (LMs) are increasingly extended with new learnable vocabulary tokens for domain-specific tasks, such as Semantic-ID tokens in generative recommendation. The standard practice initializes these new tokens as the mean of existing vocabulary embeddings, then relies on supervised fine-tuning to learn their representations. We present a systematic analysis of this strategy: through spectral and geometric diagnostics, we show that mean initialization collapses all new tokens into a degenerate subspace, erasing inter-token distinctions that subsequent fine-tuning struggles to fully recover. These findings suggest that \emph{token initialization} is a key bottleneck when extending LMs with new vocabularies. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose the \emph{Grounded Token Initialization Hypothesis}: linguistically grounding novel tokens in the pretrained embedding space before fine-tuning better enables the model to leverage its general-purpose knowledge for novel-token domains. We operationalize this hypothesis as GTI (Grounded Token Initialization), a lightweight grounding stage that, prior to fine-tuning, maps new tokens to distinct, semantically meaningful locations in the pretrained embedding space using only paired linguistic supervision. Despite its simplicity, GTI outperforms both mean initialization and existing auxiliary-task adaptation methods in the majority of evaluation settings across multiple generative recommendation benchmarks, including industry-scale and public datasets. Further analyses show that grounded embeddings produce richer inter-token structure that persists through fine-tuning, corroborating the hypothesis that initialization quality is a key bottleneck in vocabulary extension.
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