# Embedding in Recommender Systems: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.18608 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18608/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 154 of its 301 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 154)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01783/) (2016)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6652/) (2014)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04747/) (2016)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning with Differentiable Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08804/) (2018)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Wide & Deep Learning for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07792/) (2016)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Social Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07243/) (2019)
- [Recipe for a General, Powerful, Scalable Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12454/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [ComPO: Community Preferences for Language Model Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16027/) (2024)
- [MT2ST: Adaptive Multi-Task to Single-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18038/) (2024)
- [Bridge the Domains: Large Language Models Enhanced Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18383/) (2025)
- [Large Language Model Enhanced Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13432/) (2024)
- [Embedding-Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00024/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Collaborative Semantics of Language Model-Driven Recommendations via Graph-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13235/) (2024)
- [GLINT-RU: Gated Lightweight Intelligent Recurrent Units for Sequential Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10244/) (2024)
- [Generative Representational Learning of Foundation Models for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11999/) (2025)
- [Multi-Faceted Large Embedding Tables for Pinterest Ads Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05700/) (2025)
- [High Fidelity Textual User Representation over Heterogeneous Sources via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07333/) (2026)
- [Generative Archetype-Grounded Item Representations for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11023/) (2026)
- [Accelerating Recommender Model ETL with a Streaming FPGA-GPU Dataflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12032/) (2025)
- [Using LLMs to Capture Users' Temporal Context for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08512/) (2025)
- [Struc-EMB: The Potential of Structure-Aware Encoding in Language Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08774/) (2025)
- [Bridging Textual Profiles and Latent User Embeddings for Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06981/) (2026)
- [To MRL or not to MRL: Text Embeddings are Robust to Truncation Without Matryoshka Learning, Except In Heavy Truncation Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16608/) (2026)
- [BitNet Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25674/) (2026)
- [R2-Searcher: Calibrating Retrieval and Reasoning Boundaries for Agentic Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28566/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Graph World Modelling: Learning Future Dynamics from Temporal Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19364/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recommender systems have become an essential component of many online platforms, providing personalized recommendations to users. A crucial aspect is embedding techniques that convert the high-dimensional discrete features, such as user and item IDs, into low-dimensional continuous vectors, which can enhance the recommendation performance. Embedding techniques have revolutionized the capture of complex entity relationships, generating significant research interest. This survey presents a comprehensive analysis of recent advances in recommender system embedding techniques. We examine centralized embedding approaches across matrix, sequential, and graph structures. In matrix-based scenarios, collaborative filtering generates embeddings that effectively model user-item preferences, particularly in sparse data environments. For sequential data, we explore various approaches including recurrent neural networks and self-supervised methods such as contrastive and generative learning. In graph-structured contexts, we analyze techniques like node2vec that leverage network relationships, along with applicable self-supervised methods. Our survey addresses critical scalability challenges in embedding methods and explores innovative directions in recommender systems. We introduce emerging approaches, including AutoML, hashing techniques, and quantization methods, to enhance performance while reducing computational complexity. Additionally, we examine the promising role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in embedding enhancement. Through detailed discussion of various architectures and methodologies, this survey aims to provide a thorough overview of state-of-the-art embedding techniques in recommender systems, while highlighting key challenges and future research directions.