# Conditional Memory Enhanced Item Representation for Generative Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11447 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11447/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.

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

- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13366/) (2022)
- [When Attention Sink Emerges in Language Models: An Empirical View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10781/) (2024)
- [Adapting Large Language Models by Integrating Collaborative Semantics for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09049/) (2023)
- [OneRec: Unifying Retrieve and Rank with Generative Recommender and Iterative Preference Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18965/) (2025)
- [Learning Vector-Quantized Item Representation for Transferable Sequential Recommenders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12316/) (2022)
- [Learnable Item Tokenization for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07314/) (2024)
- [Lift Yourself Up: Retrieval-augmented Text Generation with Self Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02437/) (2023)
- [Shall We Pretrain Autoregressive Language Models with Retrieval? A Comprehensive Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06762/) (2023)
- [EAGER: Two-Stream Generative Recommender with Behavior-Semantic Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14017/) (2024)
- [Hash Embeddings for Efficient Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03933/) (2017)
- [Sparse Meets Dense: Unified Generative Recommendations with Cascaded Sparse-Dense Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02453/) (2025)
- [OneTrans: Unified Feature Interaction and Sequence Modeling with One Transformer in Industrial Recommender](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26104/) (2025)
- [CoST: Contrastive Quantization based Semantic Tokenization for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14774/) (2024)
- [Inductive Generative Recommendation via Retrieval-based Speculation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02939/) (2024)
- [HiD-VAE: Interpretable Generative Recommendation via Hierarchical and Disentangled Semantic IDs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04618/) (2025)
- [NEZHA: A Zero-sacrifice and Hyperspeed Decoding Architecture for Generative Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18793/) (2025)
- [Stop Treating Collisions Equally: Qualification-Aware Semantic ID Learning for Recommendation at Industrial Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00632/) (2026)
- [Bi-Level Optimization for Generative Recommendation: Bridging Tokenization and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21242/) (2025)
- [Beyond the Flat Sequence: Hierarchical and Preference-Aware Generative Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00980/) (2026)
- [A Collision-Free Hot-Tier Extension for Engram-Style Conditional Memory: A Controlled Study of Training Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16531/) (2026)
- [Pooling Engram Conditional Memory in Large Language Models using CXL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10087/) (2026)
- [IntRR: A Framework for Integrating SID Redistribution and Length Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20704/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative recommendation (GR) has emerged as a promising paradigm that predicts target items by autoregressively generating their semantic identifiers (SID). Most GR methods follow a quantization-representation-generation pipeline, first assigning each item a SID, then constructing input representations from SID-token embeddings, and finally predicting the target SID through autoregressive generation. Existing item-level representation constructions mainly take two forms: directly merging SID-token embeddings into a compact vector, or enriching item-level representations with external inputs through additional networks. However, these item-level constructors still expose two practical challenges: direct merging may amplify the information loss caused by quantization and ID collision while obscuring SID code relations, whereas external-input-based methods can strengthen item semantics but cannot reliably preserve the SID-structured evidence required for token-level generation. These limitations make representation construction an underexplored bottleneck, leading to two severe problems, ie the Identity-Structure Preservation Conflict and Input-Output Granularity Mismatch. To this end, we propose ComeIR, a Conditional Memory enhanced Item Representation framework that reconstructs SID-token embeddings into item-aware inputs and restores the token granularity during SID decoding. Specifically, MM-guided token scoring adaptively estimates the contribution of each code within the SID, dual-level Engram memory captures intra-item code composition and inter-item transition patterns, and a memory-restoring prediction head reuses the memories during SID decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of ComeIR, and further reveal scalable gains from enlarging conditional memory.