Yuchen Zheng, Sihan Xu, Jingwen Yang +3cs.IR cs.AI cs.LG
Semantic ID (SID)-based generative recommendation has recently achieved remarkable success. However, existing methods suffer from a previously overlooked fairness issue, which we term \textbf{Token Frequency Bias}, where high-frequency SID tokens are systematically over-predicted while low-frequency SID tokens are under-predicted. This bias originates from the combined effects of imbalanced semantic codebooks during SID construction, and popularity bias together with the maximum likelihood estimation objective during recommendation training, resulting in unfair exposure across item categories. Existing SID methods mainly focus on improving codebook quality and overlook the impact of token frequency imbalance on downstream recommendation fairness, while LLM debiasing methods often yield suboptimal results when directly applied to SID-based recommendation, due to the hierarchical semantics of SID tokens. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{FSGR}, a fairness optimization framework for SID-based generative recommendation. During SID construction, FSGR employs OT-based Assignment Optimization and Dual-Criteria Re-anchor mechanism to form a more balanced SID representation space. During recommendation training, it adopts a two-stage training strategy and introduces Hierarchical Frequency Calibration for layer-specific fairness fine-tuning. Experiments on three public datasets with three backbone models demonstrate that FSGR mitigates token frequency bias and delivers an average Gini fairness improvement of over 20\% while maintaining competitive recommendation accuracy.
While large language models (LLMs) have advanced ID-based recommendation through Semantic ID (SID) modeling, existing SID generation frameworks largely follow a single-representation-then-quantization paradigm. This design faces two bottlenecks: semantic entanglement mixes heterogeneous attributes, such as geography, brand, and category, causing information loss during quantization, low-quality SIDs, and severe collisions; moreover, black-box representation learning provides neither explicit attribute semantics nor clear geographic or semantic meanings for SID positions. These limitations weaken both retrieval reliability and the ability to diagnose or control SID generation. We propose Interpretable Representation via LLM-Driven Generative Disentanglement for Local-Life Service Recommendation (LGRID). LGRID introduces a generative disentanglement paradigm through an Encode -> Disentangle -> Align -> Quantize pipeline. It first uses joint LLM encoding to preserve cross-attribute geographic-semantic dependencies, rather than encoding fields independently. A Structured Disentangled Block then routes hidden states into attribute-aligned slots for geographic and semantic factors. Synergistic Alignment Learning makes these slots both generatively decodable and discriminative for retrieval, while Dual-Stream Residual Quantization separately discretizes the two streams into compact SIDs with explicit attribute correspondence. This design yields interpretable SIDs with positions grounded in item attributes and local-service semantics. Experiments on Kuaishou and Foursquare show that LGRID consistently outperforms strong SID baselines, achieving up to a 5.44 percent relative AUC gain. It also achieves over 99 percent attribute-decoding accuracy for coarse geographic fields and reduces the full-SID collision rate to 39.9 percent, compared with 97.0 percent for LGSID.
Ziyu Zheng, Zhengshun Du, Yaming Yang +5cs.IR cs.AI
Semantic ID-based generative recommendation tokenizes each item into a sequence of discrete semantic IDs and predicts the next item by generating semantic IDs. However, existing methods typically regard SIDs as independent discrete symbols, while often overlooking the topology of the learned semantic ID space. We identify a structural mismatch between tokenization and generation: the tokenizer learns a structured code space with semantic neighborhood relations, whereas the generator consumes semantic ID tokens as independent categorical symbols. Consequently, item relatedness is reduced to exact semantic ID overlap, making it difficult to identify semantically similar items whose semantic IDs do not overlap. To address this issue, we propose TopoGR, a topology-preserving generative recommendation framework based on Bit-decomposable Semantic ID(Binary SID). Each Binary SID is learned in a bit-decomposable form and can be deterministically converted to a standard integer SID, while exposing an explicit Hamming geometry. TopoGR exploits this topology at three stages: binary SID features preserve Hamming proximity at the input layer; Hamming soft targets inject topology-aware supervision; and Hamming-consistent reranking aligns candidate items with the predicted binary prototype during inference. We further verify that the Hamming topology can capture item relatedness beyond exact SID matching. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that TopoGR consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines in recommendation performance.