{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/end-to-end-training-for-recommendation-with","title":"End-to-end Training for Recommendation with Language-based User Profiles","arxiv_id":"2410.18870","date":"2024-10-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhaolin Gao","Joyce Zhou","Yijia Dai","Thorsten Joachims"],"abstract":"Many online platforms maintain user profiles for personalization. Unfortunately, these profiles are typically not interpretable or easily modifiable by the user. To remedy this shortcoming, we explore natural language-based user profiles, as they promise enhanced transparency and scrutability of recommender systems. While existing work has shown that language-based profiles from standard LLMs can be effective, such generalist LLMs are unlikely to be optimal for this task. In this paper, we introduce LangPTune, the first end-to-end learning method for training LLMs to produce language-based user profiles that optimize recommendation effectiveness. Through comprehensive evaluations of LangPTune across various training configurations and benchmarks, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing profile-based methods. In addition, it approaches performance levels comparable to state-of-the-art, less transparent recommender systems, providing a robust and interpretable alternative to conventional systems. Finally, we validate the relative interpretability of these language-based user profiles through user studies involving crowdworkers and GPT-4-based evaluations. Implementation of LangPTune can be found at https://github.com/ZhaolinGao/LangPTune.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18870v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18870v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"end-to-end-training-for-recommendation-with","repo_url":"https://github.com/zhaolingao/langptune","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"recommendation-systems","task_name":"Recommendation Systems"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2410.18870","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2410.18870","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2410.18870"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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