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Cold-Start Recommendation towards the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs): A Comprehensive Survey and Roadmap

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arxiv 2501.01945 v2 pith:7JZA2GFJ submitted 2025-01-03 cs.IR cs.AI

classification cs.IRcs.AI
keywords cold-startlanguagelargemodelscomprehensiveinformationrecommendationscommunity
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Cold-start problem is one of the long-standing challenges in recommender systems, focusing on accurately modeling new or interaction-limited users or items to provide better recommendations. Due to the diversification of internet platforms and the exponential growth of users and items, the importance of cold-start recommendation (CSR) is becoming increasingly evident. At the same time, large language models (LLMs) have achieved tremendous success and possess strong capabilities in modeling user and item information, providing new potential for cold-start recommendations. However, the research community on CSR still lacks a comprehensive review and reflection in this field. Based on this, in this paper, we stand in the context of the era of large language models and provide a comprehensive review and discussion on the roadmap, related literature, and future directions of CSR. Specifically, we have conducted an exploration of the development path of how existing CSR utilizes information, from content features, graph relations, and domain information, to the world knowledge possessed by large language models, aiming to provide new insights for both the research and industrial communities on CSR. Related resources of cold-start recommendations are collected and continuously updated for the community in https://github.com/YuanchenBei/Awesome-Cold-Start-Recommendation.

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Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. From Raw IDs to Semantic Planning: How Recommender Systems Utilize Information at Scale

    cs.IR 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    Recommender systems are moving from raw IDs to semantic IDs, and the next step should be semantic planning that first predicts an exposure's purpose before choosing or generating content.

  2. Learning Sparse Representations of Multimodal Content for Enhanced Cold Item Recommendation

    cs.IR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Sparse content embeddings with a pre-sparsification alpha-entmax activation outperform dense embeddings for cold-start item recommendation at lower storage cost, especially for users with multiple interests.

  3. Not Just What, But When: Integrating Irregular Intervals to LLM for Sequential Recommendation

    cs.IR 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    IntervalLLM integrates irregular time intervals into an LLM recommender via interval embeddings and interval-infused attention, improving next-item Hit Rate@1 on three benchmarks and adding a new interval-perspective ...

  4. Causal-Invariant Cross-Domain Out-of-Distribution Recommendation

    cs.IR 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    CICDOR learns two causal DAGs for shared and domain-specific user preferences, uses an LLM guided by the FCI algorithm to extract confounders from reviews, and reports consistent accuracy gains over twelve baselines o...

  5. Macro Graph of Experts for Billion-Scale Multi-Task Recommendation

    cs.IR 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    MGOE merges multi-task user-item graphs into a small macro graph and combines macro embeddings with mixture-of-experts towers, reporting offline and online gains that need stronger evaluation safeguards.

  6. RecGPT: A Foundation Model for Sequential Recommendation

    cs.IR 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    RecGPT turns item descriptions into shared discrete tokens and trains an autoregressive transformer to predict the next item's tokens, enabling zero-shot recommendations in unseen domains.

  7. AliBoost: Ecological Boosting Framework in Alibaba Platform

    cs.IR 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    AliBoost uses tiered exposure budgets, a fine-tuned cold-start CTR model, and item-oriented bidding to raise cold item clicks and GMV by more than 60% in 180 days.

  8. SGCL: Unifying Self-Supervised and Supervised Learning for Graph Recommendation

    cs.IR 2025-07 conditional novelty 2.0 of 10

    SGCL replaces the two-loss multi-task setup in graph recommendation with one supervised contrastive loss, reporting better accuracy and speed on Beauty and Toys-and-Games.

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