Leveraging LLM Reasoning Enhances Personalized Recommender Systems

Alicia Tsai, Adam Kraft, Long Jin, Chenwei Cai, Anahita Hosseini, Taibai Xu, Zemin Zhang, Lichan Hong, Ed Chi, Xinyang Yi


Abstract
Recent advancements have showcased the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in executing reasoning tasks, particularly facilitated by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. While tasks like arithmetic reasoning involve clear, definitive answers and logical chains of thought, the application of LLM reasoning in recommendation systems (RecSys) presents a distinct challenge. RecSys tasks revolve around subjectivity and personalized preferences, an under-explored domain in utilizing LLMs’ reasoning capabilities. Our study explores several aspects to better understand reasoning for RecSys and demonstrate how task quality improves by utilizing LLM reasoning for both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings. Additionally, we propose Rec-SAVER (Recommender Systems Automatic Verification and Evaluation of Reasoning) to automatically assess the quality of LLM reasoning responses without the requirement of curated gold references or human raters. We show that our framework aligns with real human judgment on the coherence and faithfulness of reasoning responses. Overall, our work shows that incorporating reasoning into RecSys can improve personalized tasks, paving the way for further advancements in recommender system methodologies.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.780
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13176–13188
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.780
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Alicia Tsai, Adam Kraft, Long Jin, Chenwei Cai, Anahita Hosseini, Taibai Xu, Zemin Zhang, Lichan Hong, Ed Chi, and Xinyang Yi. 2024. Leveraging LLM Reasoning Enhances Personalized Recommender Systems. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 13176–13188, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging LLM Reasoning Enhances Personalized Recommender Systems (Tsai et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.780.pdf