Enhancing ID-based Recommendation with Large Language Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces LLM4IDRec, a novel method that leverages Large Language Models to enhance ID-based recommendation systems by augmenting ID data, leading to improved recommendation accuracy without relying on textual data.

Contribution

The paper presents the first approach to utilize LLMs for ID data augmentation in ID-based recommendation systems, diverging from previous methods that focus on textual data interpretation.

Findings

LLM4IDRec outperforms existing ID-based recommendation methods.

Augmenting ID data with LLMs improves recommendation performance.

The approach is validated on three widely-used datasets.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently garnered significant attention in various domains, including recommendation systems. Recent research leverages the capabilities of LLMs to improve the performance and user modeling aspects of recommender systems. These studies primarily focus on utilizing LLMs to interpret textual data in recommendation tasks. However, it's worth noting that in ID-based recommendations, textual data is absent, and only ID data is available. The untapped potential of LLMs for ID data within the ID-based recommendation paradigm remains relatively unexplored. To this end, we introduce a pioneering approach called "LLM for ID-based Recommendation" (LLM4IDRec). This innovative approach integrates the capabilities of LLMs while exclusively relying on ID data, thus diverging from the previous reliance on textual data. The basic idea of LLM4IDRec is that by employing LLM to augment ID data, if augmented ID data can improve recommendation performance, it demonstrates the ability of LLM to interpret ID data effectively, exploring an innovative way for the integration of LLM in ID-based recommendation. We evaluate the effectiveness of our LLM4IDRec approach using three widely-used datasets. Our results demonstrate a notable improvement in recommendation performance, with our approach consistently outperforming existing methods in ID-based recommendation by solely augmenting input data.