Papers › Prompt Tuning for Item Cold-start Recommendation
Prompt Tuning for Item Cold-start Recommendation
Yuezihan Jiang, Gaode Chen, Wenhan Zhang, Jingchi Wang, Yinjie Jiang, Qi Zhang, Jingjian Lin, Peng Jiang, Kaigui Bian
The item cold-start problem is crucial for online recommender systems, as the success of the cold-start phase determines whether items can transition into popular ones. Prompt learning, a powerful technique used in natural language processing (NLP) to address zero- or few-shot problems, has been adapted for recommender systems to tackle similar challenges. However, existing methods typically rely on content-based properties or text descriptions for prompting, which we argue may be suboptimal for cold-start recommendations due to 1) semantic gaps with recommender tasks, 2) model bias caused by warm-up items contribute most of the positive feedback to the model, which is the core of the cold-start problem that hinders the recommender quality on cold-start items. We propose to leverage high-value positive feedback, termed pinnacle feedback as prompt information, to simultaneously resolve the above two problems. We experimentally prove that compared to the content description proposed in existing works, the positive feedback is more suitable to serve as prompt information by bridging the semantic gaps. Besides, we propose item-wise personalized prompt networks to encode pinnaclce feedback to relieve the model bias by the positive feedback dominance problem. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, PROMO has been successfully deployed on a popular short-video sharing platform, a billion-user scale commercial short-video application, achieving remarkable performance gains across various commercial metrics within cold-start scenarios
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections