用大模型模拟用户,发现生成式推荐反而更少形成信息茧房。
Do Generative Recommenders Deepen the Information Cocoon? A Closed-Loop Simulation with LLM-powered User Simulators

- 构建闭环仿真框架,用大模型扮演用户测试推荐效果。
- 生成式推荐暴露多样性更高,跨用户同质化更慢。
- 分词策略和模型规模显著影响信息茧房程度。
推荐系统缓解信息过载,但推荐与用户行为的循环反馈可能强化偏好、缩小信息接触范围,形成信息茧房。尽管传统序列推荐中的这一现象已被广泛研究,生成式推荐的影响仍不明确。通过将原子物品ID替换为语义ID(SID)序列,生成式推荐引入了不同的推荐机制,其对信息茧房的影响尚不清楚。为探究生成式推荐是否会加剧信息茧房,我们提出 extsc{RecLoop}——一个由大语言模型驱动用户代理的闭环仿真框架。在两个亚马逊数据集上,对比两种生成式推荐器与两种传统序列基线,在多轮反馈循环中进行评估。除了标准的暴露度指标外,我们引入 extit{Code-Space Structural Cocoon}(代码空间结构茧房)这一模型级指标,衡量生成的SID空间中的集中程度。实验结果表明,生成式推荐总体上比传统基线更不易形成暴露层面的信息茧房,保持更广的曝光多样性,并减缓跨用户同质化。然而,反馈循环仍可能导致生成的SID空间内出现集中。进一步发现,茧房严重程度强烈依赖于分词策略与模型规模:协同信号分词比语义分词产生更强的茧房效应,而更大模型能维持更高的代码空间多样性,更好地保留对小众内容的访问。这些发现表明,生成式推荐中的信息茧房不仅由推荐行为决定,还受物品分词方式和模型容量影响。代码已开源:https://github.com/Dregen-Yor/RecLoop。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recommender systems alleviate information overload, yet repeated feedback between recommendations and user interactions can reinforce existing preferences and narrow users' exposure, forming information cocoons. While this phenomenon has been widely studied in traditional sequential recommendation, its impact on generative recommendation remains unclear. By replacing atomic item IDs with Semantic ID (SID) sequences, generative recommenders introduce a different recommendation mechanism whose role in information cocoon formation is not yet understood. To investigate whether generative recommenders deepen information cocoons, we propose \textsc{RecLoop}, a closed-loop simulation framework with LLM-driven user agents. We compare two generative recommenders and two traditional sequential baselines on two Amazon datasets across multiple feedback cycles. In addition to standard exposure-level metrics, we introduce \emph{Code-Space Structural Cocoon}, a model-level metric that measures concentration in the generated SID space. Experimental results show that generative recommenders are generally less prone to exposure-level cocoon formation than traditional baselines, preserving broader exposure diversity and slowing cross-user homogenization. However, feedback loops can still induce concentration within the generated SID space. We further find that cocoon severity depends strongly on tokenization strategy and model scale: collaborative-signal tokenization produces stronger cocoon effects than semantic tokenization, whereas larger models maintain greater code-space diversity and better retain access to niche content. These findings suggest that information cocoons in generative recommendation are shaped not only by recommendation behavior, but also by item tokenization and model capacity. Our code is available at https://github.com/Dregen-Yor/RecLoop.
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