# SynGR: Unleashing the Potential of Cross-Modal Synergy for Generative Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18920 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18920/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [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)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [Session-based Recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06939/) (2015)
- [A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06435/) (2023)
- [Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13366/) (2022)
- [Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09740/) (2020)
- [S^3-Rec: Self-Supervised Learning for Sequential Recommendation with Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07873/) (2020)
- [Neural Attentive Session-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04725/) (2017)
- [Recommender Systems with Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05065/) (2023)
- [Adapting Large Language Models by Integrating Collaborative Semantics for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09049/) (2023)
- [Variable Rate Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06085/) (2015)
- [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)
- [How to Index Item IDs for Recommendation Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06569/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Generative Recommendation: A Survey and Visionary Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01157/) (2023)
- [GenRec: Large Language Model for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00457/) (2023)
- [Frequency-Aligned Knowledge Distillation for Lightweight Spatiotemporal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02939/) (2025)
- [Revisiting the Role of Language Priors in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01879/) (2023)
- [What to align in multimodal contrastive learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07402/) (2024)
- [VIP5: Towards Multimodal Foundation Models for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14302/) (2023)
- [MM-SHAP: A Performance-agnostic Metric for Measuring Multimodal Contributions in Vision and Language Models & Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08158/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03883/) (2023)
- [TokenRec: Learning to Tokenize ID for LLM-based Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10450/) (2024)
- [MISSRec: Pre-training and Transferring Multi-modal Interest-aware Sequence Representation for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11175/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SIDScope: A Diagnostic Resource for Semantic-ID Interfaces in Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18779/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative Recommendation (GR) has emerged as a promising paradigm by formulating item recommendation as a sequence-to-sequence generation task over item identifiers. Recent studies have incorporated multimodal signals to provide richer token-level evidence for generation. However, existing approaches largely rely on alignment-centric fusion and underexplore synergistic information across modalities. In practice, synergistic information plays a critical role in capturing emergent item properties that cannot be inferred from any single modality alone. Such properties encode intrinsic item semantics and guide user preferences, enabling models to move beyond surface-level feature matching. To address this limitation, we propose SynGR, a synergistic generative recommendation framework that explicitly encourages the exploitation of cross-modal dependencies during generation. By constraining overreliance on dominant modalities, SynGR enables the model to capture emergent item semantics beyond shared or modality-specific signals. Extensive experiments across three benchmark datasets demonstrate that SynGR achieves superior performance.