# FACE: A General Framework for Mapping Collaborative Filtering Embeddings into LLM Tokens

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15729 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15729/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [MobilityBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Route-Planning Agents in Real-World Mobility Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22638/) (2026)
- [ScienceDB AI: An LLM-Driven Agentic Recommender System for Large-Scale Scientific Data Sharing Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01118/) (2026)
- [SciHorizon-GENE: Benchmarking LLM for Life Sciences Inference from Gene Knowledge to Functional Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12805/) (2026)
- [CEDAR: Controlled and Event-Driven Demand Forecasting via Residual Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25871/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been explored for integration with collaborative filtering (CF)-based recommendation systems, which are crucial for personalizing user experiences. However, a key challenge is that LLMs struggle to interpret the latent, non-semantic embeddings produced by CF approaches, limiting recommendation effectiveness and further applications. To address this, we propose FACE, a general interpretable framework that maps CF embeddings into pre-trained LLM tokens. Specifically, we introduce a disentangled projection module to decompose CF embeddings into concept-specific vectors, followed by a quantized autoencoder to convert continuous embeddings into LLM tokens (descriptors). Then, we design a contrastive alignment objective to ensure that the tokens align with corresponding textual signals. Hence, the model-agnostic FACE framework achieves semantic alignment without fine-tuning LLMs and enhances recommendation performance by leveraging their pre-trained capabilities. Empirical results on three real-world recommendation datasets demonstrate performance improvements in benchmark models, with interpretability studies confirming the interpretability of the descriptors. Code is available in https://github.com/YixinRoll/FACE.