Generative Recommendation: Towards Next-generation Recommender Paradigm

Recommender systems typically retrieve items from an item corpus for personalized recommendations. However, such a retrieval-based recommender paradigm faces two limitations: 1) the human-generated items in the corpus might fail to satisfy the users' diverse information needs, and 2) users usually adjust the recommendations via passive and inefficient feedback such as clicks. Nowadays, AI-Generated Content (AIGC) has revealed significant success across various domains, offering the potential to overcome these limitations: 1) generative AI can produce personalized items to meet users' specific information needs, and 2) the newly emerged ChatGPT significantly facilitates users to express information needs more precisely via natural language instructions. In this light, the boom of AIGC points the way towards the next-generation recommender paradigm with two new objectives: 1) generating personalized content through generative AI, and 2) integrating user instructions to guide content generation. To this end, we propose a novel Generative Recommender paradigm named GeneRec, which adopts an AI generator to personalize content generation and leverages user instructions to acquire users' information needs. Specifically, we pre-process users' instructions and traditional feedback (e.g., clicks) via an instructor to output the generation guidance. Given the guidance, we instantiate the AI generator through an AI editor and an AI creator to repurpose existing items and create new items, respectively. Eventually, GeneRec can perform content retrieval, repurposing, and creation to meet users' information needs. Besides, to ensure the trustworthiness of the generated items, we emphasize various fidelity checks such as authenticity and legality checks. Lastly, we study the feasibility of implementing the AI editor and AI creator on micro-video generation, showing promising results.