Abstract:Recommender systems are among the most impactful applications of artificial intelligence, serving as critical infrastructure connecting users, merchants, and platforms. However, most current industrial systems remain heavily reliant on historical co-occurrence patterns and log-fitting objectives, i.e., optimizing for past user interactions without explicitly modeling user intent. This log-fitting approach often leads to overfitting to narrow historical preferences, failing to capture users' evolving and latent interests. As a result, it reinforces filter bubbles and long-tail phenomena, ultimately harming user experience and threatening the sustainability of the whole recommendation ecosystem. To address these challenges, we rethink the overall design paradigm of recommender systems and propose RecGPT, a next-generation framework that places user intent at the center of the recommendation pipeline. By integrating large language models (LLMs) into key stages of user interest mining, item retrieval, and explanation generation, RecGPT transforms log-fitting recommendation into an intent-centric process. To effectively align general-purpose LLMs to the above domain-specific recommendation tasks at scale, RecGPT incorporates a multi-stage training paradigm, which integrates reasoning-enhanced pre-alignment and self-training evolution, guided by a Human-LLM cooperative judge system. Currently, RecGPT has been fully deployed on the Taobao App. Online experiments demonstrate that RecGPT achieves consistent performance gains across stakeholders: users benefit from increased content diversity and satisfaction, merchants and the platform gain greater exposure and conversions. These comprehensive improvement results across all stakeholders validates that LLM-driven, intent-centric design can foster a more sustainable and mutually beneficial recommendation ecosystem.
Abstract:Regression models are crucial in recommender systems. However, retransformation bias problem has been conspicuously neglected within the community. While many works in other fields have devised effective bias correction methods, all of them are post-hoc cures externally to the model, facing practical challenges when applied to real-world recommender systems. Hence, we propose a preemptive paradigm to eradicate the bias intrinsically from the models via minor model refinement. Specifically, a novel TranSUN method is proposed with a joint bias learning manner to offer theoretically guaranteed unbiasedness under empirical superior convergence. It is further generalized into a novel generic regression model family, termed Generalized TranSUN (GTS), which not only offers more theoretical insights but also serves as a generic framework for flexibly developing various bias-free models. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our methods across data from various domains, which have been successfully deployed in two real-world industrial recommendation scenarios, i.e. product and short video recommendation scenarios in Guess What You Like business domain in the homepage of Taobao App (a leading e-commerce platform), to serve the major online traffic. Codes will be released after this paper is published.