RDRec: Rationale Distillation for LLM-based Recommendation

Xinfeng Wang, Jin Cui, Yoshimi Suzuki, Fumiyo Fukumoto


Abstract
Large language model (LLM)-based recommender models that bridge users and items through textual prompts for effective semantic reasoning have gained considerable attention. However, few methods consider the underlying rationales behind interactions, such as user preferences and item attributes, limiting the reasoning ability of LLMs for recommendations. This paper proposes a rationale distillation recommender (RDRec), a compact model designed to learn rationales generated by a larger language model (LM). By leveraging rationales from reviews related to users and items, RDRec remarkably specifies their profiles for recommendations. Experiments show that RDRec achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both top-N and sequential recommendations. Our code is available online.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-short.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short 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:
65–74
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-short.6
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinfeng Wang, Jin Cui, Yoshimi Suzuki, and Fumiyo Fukumoto. 2024. RDRec: Rationale Distillation for LLM-based Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 65–74, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RDRec: Rationale Distillation for LLM-based Recommendation (Wang et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-short.6.pdf