用隐式推理令牌提升推荐模型效率,省去冗长思考过程。
WhisperRec: Latent Reasoning for Efficient Foundation Recommendation Models

- 将教师生成的思维链压缩为可学习的隐式推理标记,实现隐式推理。
- 在快手数据集上,推荐效果比显式思维链提升17.44%,推理速度超10倍。
- 适合追求高效率与高精度推荐的工业级应用,尤其适合大模型部署。
大语言模型(LLMs)展现出强大的推理能力,推动其作为基础推荐模型(FRMs)的核心架构。现有方法通常采用显式的思维链(CoT)遵循“先思考再回答”范式,但生成长篇理由带来巨大推理开销,且固定模板难以捕捉动态多变的用户兴趣。本文提出WhisperRec,一种高效的隐式推理框架。该框架将教师生成的CoT压缩为可学习的隐式推理标记,实现“隐式推理再回答”的新范式,在不生成冗长理由的前提下保留决策相关推理信息。具体地,提出多视角自适应思维链(MV-ACoT),从互补角度构建多样化高质量监督信号,并根据实例复杂度动态调整推理强度。基于预训练的FRM,WhisperRec通过三阶段隐式推理对齐,逐步将教师CoT内化为隐表示。最后,通过课程式后训练激活隐式标记的推理能力,同时保持标准推荐性能。在工业级快手数据集及公开的Kuaishou LLM-Rec基准上,WhisperRec持续优于显式CoT方法和传统基线。相比显式思维链和无思考变体,其在SID@64指标上分别提升17.44%和9.33%,在线推理吞吐量提升超过10倍。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities, motivating their adoption as backbones for foundation recommendation models (FRMs). Existing approaches typically enhance recommendation with explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) under the Think-then-Answer paradigm. However, generating lengthy rationales introduces substantial inference overhead, while fixed CoT templates struggle to model diverse, dynamic, and context-dependent user interests. We propose WhisperRec, an efficient latent reasoning framework for FRMs. WhisperRec compresses teacher-generated CoT into learnable latent reasoning tokens, enabling a Latent-Reason-then-Answer paradigm that performs reasoning in latent space without producing verbose rationales. This design retains decision-relevant reasoning information while avoiding the latency bottleneck of autoregressive rationale generation. Specifically, it first introduces Multi-View Adaptive CoT (MV-ACoT) to construct diverse, high-quality supervision from complementary perspectives on user interests. MV-ACoT also adapts reasoning complexity to each instance, applying lightweight analysis to clear cases and targeted multi-factor reasoning to challenging ones. Building on a pre-trained FRM, WhisperRec then employs a three-stage Latent Reasoning Alignment procedure to progressively internalize teacher CoT into latent representations. Finally, curriculum-based post-training activates latent-token reasoning for downstream recommendation while preserving standard recommendation capability. Experiments on an industrial-scale Kuaishou dataset and the public Kuaishou LLM-Rec benchmark show that WhisperRec consistently outperforms explicit-CoT methods and conventional baselines. Compared with explicit CoT Think and No-Think variants, WhisperRec improves SID@64 by 17.44% and 9.33%, respectively, and achieves over 10x higher online inference throughput.
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