{"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/the-whole-is-better-than-the-sum-using","title":"The Whole is Better than the Sum: Using Aggregated Demonstrations in In-Context Learning for Sequential Recommendation","arxiv_id":"2403.10135","date":"2024-03-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Lei Wang","Ee-Peng Lim"],"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent performance on various NLP tasks. To use LLMs as strong sequential recommenders, we explore the in-context learning approach to sequential recommendation. We investigate the effects of instruction format, task consistency, demonstration selection, and number of demonstrations. As increasing the number of demonstrations in ICL does not improve accuracy despite using a long prompt, we propose a novel method called LLMSRec-Syn that incorporates multiple demonstration users into one aggregated demonstration. Our experiments on three recommendation datasets show that LLMSRec-Syn outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based sequential recommendation methods. In some cases, LLMSRec-Syn can perform on par with or even better than supervised learning methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/demoleiwang/LLMSRec_Syn.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10135v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.10135v1.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":"the-whole-is-better-than-the-sum-using","repo_url":"https://github.com/demoleiwang/llmsrec_syn","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"in-context-learning","task_name":"In-Context Learning"},{"task_slug":"sequential-recommendation","task_name":"Sequential Recommendation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2403.10135","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}