@inproceedings{cai-etal-2026-generate,
title = "Generate What You Can Trust: Content Credibility in Generative Recommenders",
author = "Cai, Zhuo and
Wu, Guanghao and
Wang, Shoujin and
Zhou, Peilin and
Chu, Victor W.",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EMNLP} 2026",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2252/",
pages = "48198--48218",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-462-0",
abstract = "Generative recommendation (GR) represents items with semantic IDs (i.e., discrete token sequences) and generates target item tokens as recommendations. Despite its promising results, existing methods predominantly optimize for accuracy while neglecting the credibility of the recommendations they generate. This oversight inevitably exposes users to uncredible content (e.g., fake news) with serious societal consequences, including user distrust, reputation harm to platforms, and broader social instability. To address this critical yet underexplored challenge, we propose CreGR, the first credible GR model that jointly tackles content credibility across the two core stages of GR: tokenization and generation. In the tokenization stage, we design a new credibility-aware tokenizer that explicitly encourages the model to learn discriminative tokens respectively for credible and uncredible items, thereby disentangling credibility signals at the token level. Building on this, in the generation stage, we propose a novel accuracy-preserving and credibility-oriented generator grounded in discrete diffusion. Specifically, we introduce an asymmetric masking probability reduction strategy that selectively diminishes the contribution of tokens associated with uncredible content to the generation process, while leaving tokens encoding user preference signals unaffected so as to preserve recommendation accuracy. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CreGR."
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<abstract>Generative recommendation (GR) represents items with semantic IDs (i.e., discrete token sequences) and generates target item tokens as recommendations. Despite its promising results, existing methods predominantly optimize for accuracy while neglecting the credibility of the recommendations they generate. This oversight inevitably exposes users to uncredible content (e.g., fake news) with serious societal consequences, including user distrust, reputation harm to platforms, and broader social instability. To address this critical yet underexplored challenge, we propose CreGR, the first credible GR model that jointly tackles content credibility across the two core stages of GR: tokenization and generation. In the tokenization stage, we design a new credibility-aware tokenizer that explicitly encourages the model to learn discriminative tokens respectively for credible and uncredible items, thereby disentangling credibility signals at the token level. Building on this, in the generation stage, we propose a novel accuracy-preserving and credibility-oriented generator grounded in discrete diffusion. Specifically, we introduce an asymmetric masking probability reduction strategy that selectively diminishes the contribution of tokens associated with uncredible content to the generation process, while leaving tokens encoding user preference signals unaffected so as to preserve recommendation accuracy. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CreGR.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Generate What You Can Trust: Content Credibility in Generative Recommenders
%A Cai, Zhuo
%A Wu, Guanghao
%A Wang, Shoujin
%A Zhou, Peilin
%A Chu, Victor W.
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F cai-etal-2026-generate
%X Generative recommendation (GR) represents items with semantic IDs (i.e., discrete token sequences) and generates target item tokens as recommendations. Despite its promising results, existing methods predominantly optimize for accuracy while neglecting the credibility of the recommendations they generate. This oversight inevitably exposes users to uncredible content (e.g., fake news) with serious societal consequences, including user distrust, reputation harm to platforms, and broader social instability. To address this critical yet underexplored challenge, we propose CreGR, the first credible GR model that jointly tackles content credibility across the two core stages of GR: tokenization and generation. In the tokenization stage, we design a new credibility-aware tokenizer that explicitly encourages the model to learn discriminative tokens respectively for credible and uncredible items, thereby disentangling credibility signals at the token level. Building on this, in the generation stage, we propose a novel accuracy-preserving and credibility-oriented generator grounded in discrete diffusion. Specifically, we introduce an asymmetric masking probability reduction strategy that selectively diminishes the contribution of tokens associated with uncredible content to the generation process, while leaving tokens encoding user preference signals unaffected so as to preserve recommendation accuracy. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CreGR.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2252/
%P 48198-48218
Markdown (Informal)
[Generate What You Can Trust: Content Credibility in Generative Recommenders](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2252/) (Cai et al., Findings 2026)
ACL