Fine-grained Semantics Integration for Large Language Model-based Recommendation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22632v2
• Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2026 11:32:44 GMT
• Title: Fine-grained Semantics Integration for Large Language Model-based Recommendation
• Authors: Jiawei Feng, Xiaoyu Kong, Leheng Sheng, Bin Wu, Chao Yi, Feifang Yang, Xiang-Rong Sheng, Han Zhu, Xiang Wang, Jiancan Wu, Xiangnan He,
• Abstract summary: We propose TS-Rec, which can integrate Token-level Semantics into LLM-based Recommenders.<n>Extensive experiments on two real-world benchmarks demonstrate that TS-Rec consistently outperforms traditional and generative baselines.
• Score: 35.75224379727093
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted in recommendation systems from the discriminative paradigm to the LLM-based generative paradigm, where the recommender autoregressively generates sequences of semantic identifiers (SIDs) for target items conditioned on historical interaction. While prevalent LLM-based recommenders have demonstrated performance gains by aligning pretrained LLMs between the language space and the SID space, modeling the SID space still faces two fundamental challenges: (1) Semantically Meaningless Initialization: SID tokens are randomly initialized, severing the semantic linkage between the SID space and the pretrained language space at start point, and (2) Coarse-grained Alignment: existing SFT-based alignment tasks primarily focus on item-level optimization, while overlooking the semantics of individual tokens within SID sequences. To address these challenges, we propose TS-Rec, which can integrate Token-level Semantics into LLM-based Recommenders. Specifically, TS-Rec comprises two key components: (1) Semantic-Aware embedding Initialization (SA-Init), which initializes SID token embeddings by applying mean pooling to the pretrained embeddings of keywords extracted by a teacher model; and (2) Token-level Semantic Alignment (TS-Align), which aligns individual tokens within the SID sequence with the shared semantics of the corresponding item clusters. Extensive experiments on two real-world benchmarks demonstrate that TS-Rec consistently outperforms traditional and generative baselines across all standard metrics. The results demonstrate that integrating fine-grained semantic information significantly enhances the performance of LLM-based generative recommenders.

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