Leveraging LLMs and Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs for Persona-Driven Session-Based Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel session-based recommendation framework that models user personas through heterogeneous knowledge graphs and LLM-derived embeddings, enhancing personalization especially in cold-start scenarios.

Contribution

It proposes a two-stage architecture combining unsupervised persona learning from a KG with integration into SBRS, grounded in structured relational signals.

Findings

Improves recommendation accuracy over baseline sequential models.

Effectively models user personas using heterogeneous knowledge graphs.

Enhances personalization in cold-start and sparse data conditions.

Abstract

Session-based recommendation systems (SBRS) aim to capture user's short-term intent from interaction sequences. However, the common assumption of anonymous sessions limits personalization, particularly under sparse or cold-start conditions. Recent advances in LLM augmented recommendation have shown that LLMs can generate rich item representations, but modeling user personas with LLMs remains challenging due to anonymous sessions. In this work, we propose a persona driven SBRS framework that explicitly models latent user personas inferred from a heterogeneous knowledge graph (KG) and integrates them into a data-driven SBRS. Our framework adopts a two-stage architecture consisting of personalized information extraction and personalized information utilization. In the personalized information extraction stage, we construct a heterogeneous KG that integrates time-independent user-item interactions, item-item relations, item-feature associations, and external metadata from DBpedia. We then learn latent user personas in an unsupervised manner using a Heterogeneous Deep Graph Infomax (HDGI) objective over a KG initialized with LLM-derived item embeddings. In the personalized information utilization stage, the learned persona representations together with LLM-derived item embeddings are incorporated into a modified architecture of data-driven SBRS to generate a candidate set of relevant items, followed by reranking using the base sequential model to emphasize short-term session intent. Unlike prior approaches that rely solely on sequence modeling or text-based user representations, our method grounds user persona modeling in structured relational signals derived from a heterogeneous KG. Experiments on Amazon Books and Amazon Movies & TV demonstrate that our approach consistently improves over sequential models with user embeddings derived using session history.