# IDGenRec: LLM-RecSys Alignment with Textual ID Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19021 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19021/

## Key facts

- Cited by 53 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04757/) (2015)
- [Session-based Recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06939/) (2015)
- [Ups and Downs: Modeling the Visual Evolution of Fashion Trends with One-Class Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01585/) (2016)
- [Personalized Top-N Sequential Recommendation via Convolutional Sequence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07426/) (2018)
- [Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13366/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19860/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09542/) (2023)
- [S^3-Rec: Self-Supervised Learning for Sequential Recommendation with Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07873/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Rankers for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08845/) (2023)
- [Chat-REC: Towards Interactive and Explainable LLMs-Augmented Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14524/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good Recommender? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10149/) (2023)
- [Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07001/) (2023)
- [Uncovering ChatGPT's Capabilities in Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02182/) (2023)
- [M6-Rec: Generative Pretrained Language Models are Open-Ended Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08084/) (2022)
- [Text Is All You Need: Learning Language Representations for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13731/) (2023)
- [Where to Go Next for Recommender Systems? ID- vs. Modality-based Recommender Models Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13835/) (2023)
- [Towards Universal Sequence Representation Learning for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05941/) (2022)
- [How to Index Item IDs for Recommendation Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06569/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Gating Networks for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09217/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models for Generative Recommendation: A Survey and Visionary Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01157/) (2023)
- [Empowering News Recommendation with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07413/) (2021)
- [GenRec: Large Language Model for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00457/) (2023)
- [VIP5: Towards Multimodal Foundation Models for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14302/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Sparse Meets Dense: Unified Generative Recommendations with Cascaded Sparse-Dense Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02453/) (2025)
- [Towards Next-Generation LLM-based Recommender Systems: A Survey and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19744/) (2024)
- [LLM as GNN: Graph Vocabulary Learning for Text-Attributed Graph Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03313/) (2025)
- [LEARN: Knowledge Adaptation from Large Language Model to Recommendation for Practical Industrial Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03988/) (2024)
- [ActionPiece: Contextually Tokenizing Action Sequences for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13581/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Generative Search and Recommendation in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16924/) (2024)
- [CoFiRec: Coarse-to-Fine Tokenization for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22707/) (2025)
- [MMQ: Multimodal Mixture-of-Quantization Tokenization for Semantic ID Generation and User Behavioral Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15281/) (2025)
- [Triple Modality Fusion: Aligning Visual, Textual, and Graph Data with Large Language Models for Multi-Behavior Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12228/) (2024)
- [STAR: A Simple Training-free Approach for Recommendations using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16458/) (2024)
- [Causality-Enhanced Behavior Sequence Modeling in LLMs for Personalized Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22809/) (2024)
- [CoMaPOI: A Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework for Next POI Prediction Bridging the Gap Between Trajectory and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23837/) (2025)
- [GRAM: Generative Recommendation via Semantic-aware Multi-granular Late Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01673/) (2025)
- [Masked Diffusion for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23021/) (2025)
- [Exploring Backdoor Attack and Defense for LLM-empowered Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11182/) (2025)
- [Eliminating Out-of-Domain Recommendations in LLM-based Recommender Systems: A Unified View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03336/) (2025)
- [Understanding Generative Recommendation with Semantic IDs from a Model-scaling View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25522/) (2025)
- [OneSearch-V2: The Latent Reasoning Enhanced Self-distillation Generative Search Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24422/) (2026)
- [DeepInterestGR: Mining Deep Multi-Interest Using Multi-Modal LLMs for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18907/) (2026)
- [Large Language Model as Universal Retriever in Industrial-Scale Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03041/) (2025)
- [Purely Semantic Indexing for LLM-based Generative Recommendation and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16446/) (2025)
- [DGenCTR: Towards a Universal Generative Paradigm for Click-Through Rate Prediction via Discrete Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14500/) (2025)
- [Spacetime-GR: A Spacetime-Aware Generative Model for Large Scale Online POI Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16126/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Time Awareness in Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13957/) (2025)
- [Continual Low-Rank Adapters for LLM-based Generative Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25093/) (2025)
- [A Unified Language Model for Large Scale Search, Recommendation, and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17533/) (2026)
- [HoloRec: Holistic Encoding and Interleaved Reasoning for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15331/) (2026)
- [Catalog-Native LLM: Speaking Item-ID Dialect with Less Entanglement for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05125/) (2025)
- [UniGRec: Unified Generative Recommendation with Soft Identifiers for End-to-End Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17438/) (2026)
- [LLM-HYPER: Generative CTR Modeling for Cold-Start Ad Personalization via LLM-Based Hypernetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12096/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative recommendation based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the traditional ranking-based recommendation style into a text-to-text generation paradigm. However, in contrast to standard NLP tasks that inherently operate on human vocabulary, current research in generative recommendations struggles to effectively encode recommendation items within the text-to-text framework using concise yet meaningful ID representations. To better align LLMs with recommendation needs, we propose IDGen, representing each item as a unique, concise, semantically rich, platform-agnostic textual ID using human language tokens. This is achieved by training a textual ID generator alongside the LLM-based recommender, enabling seamless integration of personalized recommendations into natural language generation. Notably, as user history is expressed in natural language and decoupled from the original dataset, our approach suggests the potential for a foundational generative recommendation model. Experiments show that our framework consistently surpasses existing models in sequential recommendation under standard experimental setting. Then, we explore the possibility of training a foundation recommendation model with the proposed method on data collected from 19 different datasets and tested its recommendation performance on 6 unseen datasets across different platforms under a completely zero-shot setting. The results show that the zero-shot performance of the pre-trained foundation model is comparable to or even better than some traditional recommendation models based on supervised training, showing the potential of the IDGen paradigm serving as the foundation model for generative recommendation. Code and data are open-sourced at https://github.com/agiresearch/IDGenRec.