RAGR: Review-Augmented Generative Recommendation

TL;DR

RAGR is a novel generative recommendation framework that integrates review feedback into user sequences, improving recommendation accuracy by modeling both behavioral and evaluative factors.

Contribution

It introduces a review-augmented sequence modeling approach and an item-centric task alignment strategy, advancing generative recommendation methods.

Findings

RAGR outperforms strong baselines across all metrics on three datasets.

Incorporating review signals enhances recommendation quality.

The approach demonstrates consistent and significant improvements.

Abstract

Sequential recommendation (SR) is traditionally formulated as next-item prediction over a chronological sequence of interacted items. Although recent generative recommendation (GR) methods introduce new machinery, such as semantic IDs, autoregressive decoding, and unified token spaces, they largely inherit the same item-only modeling assumption. We argue that this design constitutes a structural bottleneck, because user decision-making is not purely behavioral: while item interactions reveal what users choose, review feedback often explain why they choose it by exposing latent evaluative factors. Motivated by this observation, we propose Review-Augmented Generative Recommendation (RAGR), a novel GR framework that incorporates review feedback directly into the generative user sequence rather than treating reviews as auxiliary side information. Specifically, RAGR introduces a Review-Augmented User Sequence Modeling mechanism that interleaves item semantic IDs and review semantic IDs in chronological order to construct a mixed behavioral-semantic sequence, enabling review signals to participate directly in autoregressive next-token generation. To preserve the recommendation objective, we further introduce an Item-Centric Task Generation Alignment strategy based on direct preference optimization (DPO), which encourages the model to favor item tokens over review tokens at prediction positions. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that RAGR yields consistent and significant gains over strong GR backbones across all metrics. Our code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/Zhang-Yingyi/TKDE_RAGR}.