Ivan Sukharev
2026
Learning When to Personalize: LLM Based Playlist Generation via Query Taxonomy and Classification
Fedor Buzaev | Ivan Sukharev | Rinat Mullahmetov | Roman Bogachev | Ilya Sedunov | Oleg Pavlovich | Daria Pugacheva
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on NLP for Music and Audio (NLP4MusA 2026)
Fedor Buzaev | Ivan Sukharev | Rinat Mullahmetov | Roman Bogachev | Ilya Sedunov | Oleg Pavlovich | Daria Pugacheva
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on NLP for Music and Audio (NLP4MusA 2026)
Playlist generation based on textual queries using large language models (LLMs) is becoming an important interaction paradigm for music streaming platforms. User queries span a wide spectrum from highly personalized intent to essentially catalog-style requests. Existing systems typically rely on non-personalized retrieval/ranking or apply a fixed level of preference conditioning to every query, which can overfit catalog queries to a single user or under-personalize explicitly listener-dependent requests. We present an industrial-scale LLM-based playlist generation system with dynamic personalization that adapts the personalization strength to the query type. We define a query taxonomy, train a query-type classifier on 5,000 manually labeled queries, and use its predicted probability to modulate the mixture of LLM-based semantic scoring and personalized evaluation. In a blind user study with pairwise comparisons and ELO aggregation, this approach consistently outperforms both non-personalized and fixed-personalization baselines.