# Large Language Models for User Interest Journeys

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15498 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15498/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08593/) (2019)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Universal Sentence Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11175/) (2018)
- [Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13366/) (2022)
- [Deep Interest Evolution Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03672/) (2018)
- [Top-K Off-Policy Correction for a REINFORCE Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02353/) (2018)
- [Practice on Long Sequential User Behavior Modeling for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09248/) (2019)
- [Pathways: Asynchronous Distributed Dataflow for ML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12533/) (2022)
- [PinnerFormer: Sequence Modeling for User Representation at Pinterest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04507/) (2022)
- [On Natural Language User Profiles for Transparent and Scrutable Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09403/) (2022)
- [Intent-Aware Contextual Recommendation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10558/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01171/) (2024)
- [Recommender Systems in the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02046/) (2023)
- [How Can Recommender Systems Benefit from Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05817/) (2023)
- [From Matching to Generation: A Survey on Generative Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14851/) (2024)
- [ReLLa: Retrieval-enhanced Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11131/) (2023)
- [HYDRA: Model Factorization Framework for Black-Box LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02888/) (2024)
- [Measuring What Makes You Unique: Difference-Aware User Modeling for Enhancing LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02450/) (2025)
- [LLMs + Persona-Plug = Personalized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11901/) (2024)
- [AI PERSONA: Towards Life-long Personalization of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13103/) (2024)
- [Data Augmentation using Large Language Models: Data Perspectives, Learning Paradigms and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02990/) (2024)
- [User Modeling in the Era of Large Language Models: Current Research and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11518/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Potential of LLMs as Personalized Assistants: Dataset, Evaluation, and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01262/) (2025)
- [LLMs for User Interest Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16363/) (2024)
- [PersonaFeedback: A Large-scale Human-annotated Benchmark For Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12915/) (2025)
- [Personalized Language Models via Privacy-Preserving Evolutionary Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18008/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models in Multimodal Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09777/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models Make Sample-Efficient Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02368/) (2024)
- [TRACE: Transformer-based user Representations from Attributed Clickstream Event sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12972/) (2024)
- [IP-Dialog: Evaluating Implicit Personalization in Dialogue Systems with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02449/) (2025)
- [Iterative Critique-Refine Framework for Enhancing LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24469/) (2025)
- [Full-Stack Optimized Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13344/) (2025)
- [Conversational Planning for Personal Plans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19500/) (2025)
- [YNTP-100: A Benchmark for Your Next Token Prediction with 100 People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14398/) (2025)
- [Reflective Personalization Optimization: A Post-hoc Rewriting Framework for Black-Box Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05286/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation. Their potential for deeper user understanding and improved personalized user experience on recommendation platforms is, however, largely untapped. This paper aims to address this gap. Recommender systems today capture users' interests through encoding their historical activities on the platforms. The generated user representations are hard to examine or interpret. On the other hand, if we were to ask people about interests they pursue in their life, they might talk about their hobbies, like I just started learning the ukulele, or their relaxation routines, e.g., I like to watch Saturday Night Live, or I want to plant a vertical garden. We argue, and demonstrate through extensive experiments, that LLMs as foundation models can reason through user activities, and describe their interests in nuanced and interesting ways, similar to how a human would. We define interest journeys as the persistent and overarching user interests, in other words, the non-transient ones. These are the interests that we believe will benefit most from the nuanced and personalized descriptions. We introduce a framework in which we first perform personalized extraction of interest journeys, and then summarize the extracted journeys via LLMs, using techniques like few-shot prompting, prompt-tuning and fine-tuning. Together, our results in prompting LLMs to name extracted user journeys in a large-scale industrial platform demonstrate great potential of these models in providing deeper, more interpretable, and controllable user understanding. We believe LLM powered user understanding can be a stepping stone to entirely new user experiences on recommendation platforms that are journey-aware, assistive, and enabling frictionless conversation down the line.