Session-Based Recommendation with Validated and Enriched LLM Intents

Abstract: Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to predict the next item for an anonymous user in a timely manner. However, SBR suffers from data sparsity due to the short and anonymous nature of sessions. Recently, an emerging line of work has explored inferring the underlying user intents of a session using LLMs, with the generated intents serving as auxiliary training signals to enhance SBR models. Despite its promise, this approach faces three key challenges: validating intent quality, incorporating session-level multi-intents, and complementing inevitable LLM failure cases. In this paper, we propose VELI4SBR, a two-stage framework that leverages Validated and Enriched LLM-generated Intents for SBR. In the first stage, we generate high-quality intents using a predict-and-correct loop that validates the informativeness of LLM-generated intents with a global intent pool to constrain the LLM's output space and reduce hallucination. In the second stage, we enhance the SBR model using the generated intents through a lightweight multi-intent prediction and fusion mechanism. Furthermore, we introduce a training strategy that compensates for LLM failures by inferring intents from inter-session behavioral similarities. Extensive experiments show that VELI4SBR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while improving explainability.