The Oracle and The Prism: A Decoupled and Efficient Framework for Generative Recommendation Explanation

TL;DR

This paper introduces Prism, a decoupled framework for recommendation explanations that uses knowledge distillation from a large teacher model to a smaller student, achieving high-quality, efficient, and trustworthy explanations.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel decoupled architecture and distillation method that improves explanation quality and efficiency in recommendation systems.

Findings

The distillation process filters noise and enhances explanation faithfulness.

The Prism model outperforms larger teachers in human evaluations.

Achieves 24x speedup and 10x memory reduction.

Abstract

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into explainable recommendation systems often leads to a performance-efficiency trade-off in end-to-end architectures, where joint optimization of ranking and explanation can result in suboptimal compromises. To resolve this, we propose Prism, a novel decoupled framework that rigorously separates the recommendation process into a dedicated ranking stage and an explanation generation stage. This decomposition ensures that each component is optimized for its specific objective, eliminating inherent conflicts in coupled models. Inspired by knowledge distillation, Prism leverages a powerful, instruction-following teacher LLM (FLAN-T5-XXL) as an Oracle to produce high-fidelity explanatory knowledge. A compact, fine-tuned student model (BART-Base), the Prism, then specializes in synthesizing this knowledge into personalized explanations. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets reveal a key finding: the distillation process not only transfers knowledge but also acts as a noise filter. Our 140M-parameter Prism model significantly outperforms its 11B-parameter teacher in human evaluations of faithfulness and personalization, demonstrating an emergent ability to correct hallucinations present in the teacher's outputs. While achieving a 24x speedup and a 10x reduction in memory consumption, our analysis validates that decoupling, coupled with targeted distillation, provides an efficient and effective pathway to high-quality, and perhaps more importantly, trustworthy explainable recommendation.