A Survey on Generative Recommendation: Data, Model, and Tasks

Recommender systems serve as foundational infrastructure in modern information ecosystems, helping users navigate digital content and discover items aligned with their preferences. At their core, recommender systems address a fundamental problem: matching users with items. Over the past decades, the field has experienced successive paradigm shifts, from collaborative filtering and matrix factorization in the machine learning era to neural architectures in the deep learning era. Recently, the emergence of generative models, especially large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models, have sparked a new paradigm: generative recommendation, which reconceptualizes recommendation as a generation task rather than discriminative scoring. This survey provides a comprehensive examination through a unified tripartite framework spanning data, model, and task dimensions. Rather than simply categorizing works, we systematically decompose approaches into operational stages-data augmentation and unification, model alignment and training, task formulation and execution. At the data level, generative models enable knowledge-infused augmentation and agent-based simulation while unifying heterogeneous signals. At the model level, we taxonomize LLM-based methods, large recommendation models, and diffusion approaches, analyzing their alignment mechanisms and innovations. At the task level, we illuminate new capabilities including conversational interaction, explainable reasoning, and personalized content generation. We identify five key advantages: world knowledge integration, natural language understanding, reasoning capabilities, scaling laws, and creative generation. We critically examine challenges in benchmark design, model robustness, and deployment efficiency, while charting a roadmap toward intelligent recommendation assistants that fundamentally reshape human-information interaction.

Invariance Matters: Empowering Social Recommendation via Graph Invariant Learning

Graph-based social recommendation systems have shown significant promise in enhancing recommendation performance, particularly in addressing the issue of data sparsity in user behaviors. Typically, these systems leverage Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to capture user preferences by incorporating high-order social influences from observed social networks. However, existing graph-based social recommendations often overlook the fact that social networks are inherently noisy, containing task-irrelevant relationships that can hinder accurate user preference learning. The removal of these redundant social relations is crucial, yet it remains challenging due to the lack of ground truth. In this paper, we approach the social denoising problem from the perspective of graph invariant learning and propose a novel method, Social Graph Invariant Learning(SGIL). Specifically,SGIL aims to uncover stable user preferences within the input social graph, thereby enhancing the robustness of graph-based social recommendation systems. To achieve this goal, SGIL first simulates multiple noisy social environments through graph generators. It then seeks to learn environment-invariant user preferences by minimizing invariant risk across these environments. To further promote diversity in the generated social environments, we employ an adversarial training strategy to simulate more potential social noisy distributions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SGIL. The code is available at https://github.com/yimutianyang/SIGIR2025-SGIL.