Learnable Tokenizer for LLM-based Generative Recommendation

Harnessing Large Language Models (LLMs) for generative recommendation has garnered significant attention due to LLMs' powerful capacities such as rich world knowledge and reasoning. However, a critical challenge lies in transforming recommendation data into the language space of LLMs through effective item tokenization. Existing approaches, such as ID identifiers, textual identifiers, and codebook-based identifiers, exhibit limitations in encoding semantic information, incorporating collaborative signals, or handling code assignment bias. To address these shortcomings, we propose LETTER (a LEarnable Tokenizer for generaTivE Recommendation), designed to meet the key criteria of identifiers by integrating hierarchical semantics, collaborative signals, and code assignment diversity. LETTER integrates Residual Quantized VAE for semantic regularization, a contrastive alignment loss for collaborative regularization, and a diversity loss to mitigate code assignment bias. We instantiate LETTER within two generative recommender models and introduce a ranking-guided generation loss to enhance their ranking ability. Extensive experiments across three datasets demonstrate the superiority of LETTER in item tokenization, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art in the field of generative recommendation.