SCoTER: Structured Chain-of-Thought Transfer for Enhanced Recommendation

Harnessing the reasoning power of Large Language Models (LLMs) for recommender systems is hindered by two fundamental challenges. First, current approaches lack a mechanism for automated, data-driven discovery of effective reasoning patterns, relying instead on brittle manual templates or unstable zero-shot prompting. Second, they employ structure-collapsing integration: direct prompting incurs prohibitive online inference costs, while feature extraction collapses reasoning chains into single vectors, discarding stepwise logic. To address these challenges, we propose SCoTER (Structured Chain-of-Thought Transfer for Enhanced Recommendation), a unified framework that treats pattern discovery and structure-aware transfer as a jointly optimized problem. Specifically, SCoTER operationalizes this through two synergistic components: a Generate-Validate-Mine (GVM) pipeline for automated pattern discovery and a structure-preserving integration architecture that transfers stepwise logic to efficient models. Empirically, experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements across diverse backbones. Moreover, in production deployment on the Tencent Advertising Platform, SCoTER achieved a 2.14% lift in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) while eliminating online LLM inference costs. Overall, SCoTER presents a practical and unified framework for integrating structured LLM reasoning into recommender systems, validated by consistent improvements in both offline benchmarks and online production environments.