Effectiveness of LLMs in Temporal User Profiling for Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper explores how Large Language Models can improve temporal user profiling in recommender systems by capturing short-term and long-term preferences, with benefits varying across domains and offering interpretability insights.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of LLMs to generate richer, temporally-aware user profiles and discusses their domain-dependent effectiveness and interpretability advantages.

Findings

LLMs improve recommendations in active domains like Movies&TV.

Benefits are less in sparse environments like Video Games.

The approach offers inherent interpretability through natural language profiles.

Abstract

Effectively modeling the dynamic nature of user preferences is crucial for enhancing recommendation accuracy and fostering transparency in recommender systems. Traditional user profiling often overlooks the distinction between transitory short-term interests and stable long-term preferences. This paper examines the capability of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to capture these temporal dynamics, generating richer user representations through distinct short-term and long-term textual summaries of interaction histories. Our observations suggest that while LLMs tend to improve recommendation quality in domains with more active user engagement, their benefits appear less pronounced in sparser environments. This disparity likely stems from the varying distinguishability of short-term and long-term preferences across domains; the approach shows greater utility where these temporal interests are more clearly separable (e.g., Movies\&TV) compared to domains with more stable user profiles (e.g., Video Games). This highlights a critical trade-off between enhanced performance and computational costs, suggesting context-dependent LLM application. Beyond predictive capability, this LLM-driven approach inherently provides an intrinsic potential for interpretability through its natural language profiles and attention weights. This work contributes insights into the practical capability and inherent interpretability of LLM-driven temporal user profiling, outlining new research directions for developing adaptive and transparent recommender systems.