Enhancing LLM-based Recommendation through Semantic-Aligned Collaborative Knowledge

Abstract: LLMs demonstrate remarkable capabilities in leveraging comprehensive world knowledge and sophisticated reasoning mechanisms for recommendation tasks. However, a notable limitation lies in their inability to effectively model sparse identifiers (e.g., user and item IDs), unlike conventional collaborative filtering models (Collabs.), thus hindering LLM to learn distinctive user-item representations and creating a performance bottleneck. Prior studies indicate that integrating collaborative knowledge from Collabs. into LLMs can mitigate the above limitations and enhance their recommendation performance. Nevertheless, the significant discrepancy in knowledge distribution and semantic space between LLMs and Collab. presents substantial challenges for effective knowledge transfer. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel framework, SeLLa-Rec, which focuses on achieving alignment between the semantic spaces of Collabs. and LLMs. This alignment fosters effective knowledge fusion, mitigating the influence of discriminative noise and facilitating the deep integration of knowledge from diverse models. Specifically, three special tokens with collaborative knowledge are embedded into the LLM's semantic space through a hybrid projection layer and integrated into task-specific prompts to guide the recommendation process. Experiments conducted on two public benchmark datasets (MovieLens-1M and Amazon Book) demonstrate that SeLLa-Rec achieves state-of-the-art performance.