提出非均匀量化方法,提升生成式推荐的语义编码质量。
CARD: Non-Uniform Quantization of Visual Semantic Unit for Generative Recommendation

- 融合文本、视觉与协同信号构建统一视觉语义单元,增强语义建模。
- 引入可学习的非均匀变换,平衡编码分布,提升码本利用率与精度。
- 模块可插拔,适配多种量化方案,适用于高阶生成推荐系统。
生成式推荐框架通常将物品表示为离散的语义标识符(SIDs)。现有研究虽通过融合多模态内容、协同信号或先进量化技术改进SID构造,但高质量SID的学习仍面临两大挑战:(1) 两阶段生成范式(SID构建与自回归生成)对异构信息融合的监督不足,制约高质量SID学习;(2) 非均匀嵌入导致码字失衡与生成偏差。为此,本文提出新型生成式推荐框架CARD。CARD引入视觉语义单元,在编码前将文本、视觉与协同信号统一为结构化视觉表示,实现整体语义建模,有效缓解语义鸿沟,降低对监督信号的依赖。此外,针对推荐场景中项目语义嵌入高度非均匀分布的问题,设计非均匀量化框架NU-RQ-VAE,将可学习且可逆的非均匀变换引入量化过程,将偏斜的语义分布映射至更均衡的潜在空间,显著提升码本利用率与量化精度。多数据集实验表明,CARD在各类设置下均优于基线方法;所提非均匀变换模块具备即插即用性,对不同量化方案保持鲁棒性。代码已开源:https://github.com/HAI-UESTC/CARD。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Generative recommendation frameworks typically represent items as discrete Semantic IDs (SIDs). While existing studies have sought to enhance SID construction by incorporating multimodal content, collaborative signals, or more advanced quantization techniques, learning high-quality SIDs still faces two key challenges: (1) The two-stage generative recommendation paradigm (SID construction and autoregressive generation) provides insufficient supervision for heterogeneous fusion, which hinders learning high-quality SIDs, and (2) non-uniform embeddings lead to codeword imbalance and generation bias. To address these challenges, we propose a novel generative recommendation framework, called CARD. CARD introduces a visual semantic unit that unifies textual, visual, and collaborative signals into a structured visual representation prior to encoding, enabling holistic semantic modeling and effectively alleviating the semantic gap, thereby reducing the reliance on supervision signals during SID learning. Furthermore, to deal with the highly non-uniform distribution of item semantic embeddings in recommendation scenarios, we develop a non-uniform quantization framework (NU-RQ-VAE), which incorporates a learnable and invertible non-uniform transformation into the quantization process to map skewed semantic distributions into a more balanced latent space, thereby significantly improving codebook utilization and quantization accuracy. Experiments on multiple datasets show that CARD consistently outperforms baseline methods under various settings; meanwhile, the proposed non-uniform transformation module is plug-and-play and remains robust across different quantization schemes. Code is available at https://github.com/HAI-UESTC/CARD.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。