PRISM: Purified Representation and Integrated Semantic Modeling for Generative Sequential Recommendation

TL;DR

PRISM introduces a novel framework for generative sequential recommendation that enhances semantic tokenization and integrates hierarchical semantics to improve recommendation accuracy, especially in sparse data scenarios.

Contribution

It proposes a purified semantic quantizer and an integrated semantic recommender to address semantic ambiguity and information loss in GSR.

Findings

PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four datasets.

Significant improvements in high-sparsity scenarios.

Enhanced semantic tokenization stability and recommendation quality.

Abstract

Generative Sequential Recommendation (GSR) has emerged as a promising paradigm, reframing recommendation as an autoregressive sequence generation task over discrete Semantic IDs (SIDs), typically derived via codebook-based quantization. Despite its great potential in unifying retrieval and ranking, existing GSR frameworks still face two critical limitations: (1) impure and unstable semantic tokenization, where quantization methods struggle with interaction noise and codebook collapse, resulting in SIDs with ambiguous discrimination; and (2) lossy and weakly structured generation, where reliance solely on coarse-grained discrete tokens inevitably introduces information loss and neglects items' hierarchical logic. To address these issues, we propose a novel generative recommendation framework, PRISM, with Purified Representation and Integrated Semantic Modeling. Specifically, to ensure high-quality tokenization, we design a Purified Semantic Quantizer that constructs a robust codebook via adaptive collaborative denoising and hierarchical semantic anchoring mechanisms. To compensate for information loss during quantization, we further propose an Integrated Semantic Recommender, which incorporates a dynamic semantic integration mechanism to integrate fine-grained semantics and enforces logical validity through a semantic structure alignment objective. PRISM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across four real-world datasets, demonstrating substantial performance gains, particularly in high-sparsity scenarios.