{"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/recexplainer-aligning-large-language-models","title":"RecExplainer: Aligning Large Language Models for Explaining Recommendation Models","arxiv_id":"2311.10947","date":"2023-11-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yuxuan Lei","Jianxun Lian","Jing Yao","Xu Huang","Defu Lian","Xing Xie"],"abstract":"Recommender systems are widely used in online services, with embedding-based models being particularly popular due to their expressiveness in representing complex signals. However, these models often function as a black box, making them less transparent and reliable for both users and developers. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable intelligence in understanding, reasoning, and instruction following. This paper presents the initial exploration of using LLMs as surrogate models to explaining black-box recommender models. The primary concept involves training LLMs to comprehend and emulate the behavior of target recommender models. By leveraging LLMs' own extensive world knowledge and multi-step reasoning abilities, these aligned LLMs can serve as advanced surrogates, capable of reasoning about observations. Moreover, employing natural language as an interface allows for the creation of customizable explanations that can be adapted to individual user preferences. To facilitate an effective alignment, we introduce three methods: behavior alignment, intention alignment, and hybrid alignment. Behavior alignment operates in the language space, representing user preferences and item information as text to mimic the target model's behavior; intention alignment works in the latent space of the recommendation model, using user and item representations to understand the model's behavior; hybrid alignment combines both language and latent spaces. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three public datasets show that our approach yields promising results in understanding and mimicking target models, producing high-quality, high-fidelity, and distinct explanations. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/RecAI.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10947v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.10947v2.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":"recexplainer-aligning-large-language-models","repo_url":"https://github.com/microsoft/recai","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"explanation-generation","task_name":"Explanation Generation"},{"task_slug":"instruction-following","task_name":"Instruction Following"},{"task_slug":"recommendation-systems","task_name":"Recommendation Systems"},{"task_slug":"world-knowledge","task_name":"World Knowledge"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2311.10947","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2311.10947"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+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. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/microsoft/recai","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"8a0c67573897efe9","entry":"make_model_gradient_checkpointing_compatible","repo":"microsoft/recai","repo_kind":"official","path":"RecLM-emb/src/model.py","file_url":"https://github.com/microsoft/recai/blob/HEAD/RecLM-emb/src/model.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"8a0c67573897efe9"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}