Aligning Large Language Models for Controllable Recommendations

Wensheng Lu, Jianxun Lian, Wei Zhang, Guanghua Li, Mingyang Zhou, Hao Liao, Xing Xie


Abstract
Inspired by the exceptional general intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers have begun to explore their application in pioneering the next generation of recommender systems — systems that are conversational, explainable, and controllable. However, existing literature primarily concentrates on integrating domain-specific knowledge into LLMs to enhance accuracy using a fixed task template, often overlooking the diversity of recommendation tasks and the ability of LLMs to follow recommendation-specific instructions. To address this gap, we first introduce a collection of supervised learning tasks, augmented with labels derived from a conventional recommender model, aimed at explicitly improving LLMs’ proficiency in adhering to recommendation-specific instructions. Next, we propose a reinforcement learning-based alignment procedure to enhance LLMs’ generalization ability. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the capability of LLMs to respond to instructions within recommender systems, reducing formatting errors while maintaining a high level of accuracy.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.443
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8159–8172
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.443
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wensheng Lu, Jianxun Lian, Wei Zhang, Guanghua Li, Mingyang Zhou, Hao Liao, and Xing Xie. 2024. Aligning Large Language Models for Controllable Recommendations. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8159–8172, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Aligning Large Language Models for Controllable Recommendations (Lu et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.443.pdf