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Yejing Wang

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3 papers

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

LLMEmb: Large Language Model Can Be a Good Embedding Generator for Sequential Recommendation

Qidong Liu
Xian Wu
Wanyu Wang
Yejing Wang
Yuanshao Zhu
Xiangyu Zhao
Feng Tian
Yefeng Zheng

Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS), which model a user's interaction history to predict the next item of interest, are widely used in various applications. However, existing SRS often struggle with low-popularity items, a challenge known as the long-tail problem. This issue leads to reduced serendipity for users and diminished profits for sellers, ultimately harming the overall system. Large Language Model (LLM) has the ability to capture semantic relationships between items, independent of their popularity, making them a promising solution to this problem. In this paper, we introduce LLMEmb, a novel method leveraging LLM to generate item embeddings that enhance SRS performance. To bridge the gap between general-purpose LLM and the recommendation domain, we propose a Supervised Contrastive Fine-Tuning (SCFT) approach. This approach includes attribute-level data augmentation and a tailored contrastive loss to make LLM more recommendation-friendly. Additionally, we emphasize the importance of integrating collaborative signals into LLM-generated embeddings, for which we propose Recommendation Adaptation Training (RAT). This further refines the embeddings for optimal use in SRS. The LLMEmb-derived embeddings can be seamlessly integrated with any SRS model, underscoring the practical value. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that LLMEmb significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple SRS models.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

SIGMA: Selective Gated Mamba for Sequential Recommendation

Ziwei Liu
Qidong Liu
Yejing Wang
Wanyu Wang
Pengyue Jia
Maolin Wang
Zitao Liu
Yi Chang

Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS) has stood out as a highly promising technique in numerous domains due to its impressive capability of capturing complex user preferences. Current SRS have employed transformer-based models to give the next-item prediction. Nevertheless, its quadratic computational complexity has often resulted in notable inefficiencies, posing a significant obstacle to real-time recommendation processes. Recently, Mamba has demonstrated its exceptional effectiveness in time series prediction, delivering substantial improvements in both efficiency and effectiveness. However, directly applying Mamba to SRS poses certain challenges. Its unidirectional structure may impede the ability to capture contextual information in user-item interactions, while its instability in state estimation may hinder the ability to capture short-term patterns in interaction sequences. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called Selective Gated Mamba for Sequential Recommendation (SIGMA). By introducing the Partially Flipped Mamba (PF-Mamba), we construct a special bi-directional structure to address the context modeling challenge. Then, to consolidate PF-Mamba's performance, we employed an input-dependent Dense Selective Gate (DS Gate) to allocate the weights of the two directions and further filter the sequential information. Moreover, for short sequence modeling, we devise a Feature Extract GRU (FE-GRU) to capture the short-term dependencies. Experimental results demonstrate that SIGMA significantly outperforms existing baselines across five real-world datasets. Our implementation code is available in Supplementary Material to ease reproducibility.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

LLM-ESR: Large Language Models Enhancement for Long-tailed Sequential Recommendation

Qidong Liu
Xian Wu
Yejing Wang
Zijian Zhang
Feng Tian
Yefeng Zheng
Xiangyu Zhao

Sequential recommender systems (SRS) aim to predict users' subsequent choices based on their historical interactions and have found applications in diverse fields such as e-commerce and social media. However, in real-world systems, most users interact with only a handful of items, while the majority of items are seldom consumed. These two issues, known as the long-tail user and long-tail item challenges, often pose difficulties for existing SRS. These challenges can adversely affect user experience and seller benefits, making them crucial to address. Though a few works have addressed the challenges, they still struggle with the seesaw or noisy issues due to the intrinsic scarcity of interactions. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) present a promising solution to these problems from a semantic perspective. As one of the pioneers in this field, we propose the Large Language Models Enhancement framework for Sequential Recommendation (LLM-ESR). This framework utilizes semantic embeddings derived from LLMs to enhance SRS without adding extra inference load. To address the long-tail item challenge, we design a dual-view modeling framework that combines semantics from LLMs and collaborative signals from conventional SRS. For the long-tail user challenge, we propose a retrieval augmented self-distillation method to enhance user preference representation using more informative interactions from similar users. To verify the effectiveness and versatility of our proposed enhancement framework, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets using three popular SRS models. The results consistently show that our method surpasses existing baselines. The implementation code is available in Supplementary Material.

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