When LLM-Based User Profiling Adds Value in Production Streaming Recommendation

Abstract: Personalized recommendation depends critically on how user representations are constructed from historical behavior. Two paradigms have emerged for constructing semantic user profiles in content-based recommendation. First, aggregate methods derive user representations as numerical aggregates of semantic item embeddings. Second, LLM-based methods generate natural-language summaries of user preferences and encode them through a text encoder. Each paradigm can be combined with temporal disentanglement of recent versus historical behavior. LLM-based profile generation is significantly more expensive than aggregate approaches, raising the question of when this additional cost is justified. We present a systematic comparison of four semantic user-profiling strategies, factorially crossed across representation type and temporal handling, evaluated on a real-world production dataset. The comparison reveals how these strategies differ across user behavior types, across both accuracy and beyond-accuracy dimensions of recommendation quality, and across the temporal-window setting that governs the disentanglement.