ReLand: Integrating Large Language Models’ Insights into Industrial Recommenders via a Controllable Reasoning Pool

Abstract

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in addressing the isolation issues faced by recommender systems. However, despite performance comparable to traditional recommenders, the current methods are cost-prohibitive for industrial applications. Consequently, existing LLM-based methods still need to catch up regarding effectiveness and efficiency. To tackle the above challenges, we present an LLM-enhanced recommendation framework named ReLand, which leverages Retrieval to effortlessly integrate Large language models’ insights into industrial recommenders. Specifically, ReLand employs LLMs to perform generative recommendations on sampled users (a.k.a., seed users), thereby constructing an LLM Reasoning Pool. Subsequently, we leverage retrieval to attach reliable recommendation rationales for the entire user base, ultimately effectively improving recommendation performance. Extensive offline and online experiments validate the effectiveness of ReLand. Since January 2024, ReLand has been deployed in the recommender system of Alipay, achieving statistically significant improvements of 3.19% in CTR and 1.08% in CVR.