Peibo Li

Peibo Li, Maarten de Rijke, Hao Xue et al.

The next Point of Interest (POI) recommendation task is to predict users' immediate next POI visit given their historical data. Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) data, which is often used for the next POI recommendation task, comes with challenges. One frequently disregarded challenge is how to effectively use the abundant contextual information present in LBSN data. Previous methods are limited by their numerical nature and fail to address this challenge. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle this challenge. Our framework allows us to preserve heterogeneous LBSN data in its original format, hence avoiding the loss of contextual information. Furthermore, our framework is capable of comprehending the inherent meaning of contextual information due to the inclusion of commonsense knowledge. In experiments, we test our framework on three real-world LBSN datasets. Our results show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models in all three datasets. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework in using contextual information as well as alleviating the commonly encountered cold-start and short trajectory problems.

Peibo Li, Shuang Ao, Hao Xue et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have been adopted for next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation tasks. Typical LLM-based recommenders fall into two categories: prompt-based and supervised fine-tuning (SFT)-based models. Prompt-based models generally offer greater output flexibility but deliver lower accuracy, whereas SFT-based models achieve higher performance yet face a fundamental mismatch: next POI recommendation data does not naturally suit supervised fine-tuning. In SFT, the model is trained to reproduce the exact ground truth, but each training example provides only a single target POI, so there is no ground truth for producing a top-k list. To address this, we propose Refine-POI, a reinforcement fine-tuning framework for next POI recommendation. We introduce recommendation-driven rewards that enable LLMs to learn to generate top-k recommendation lists using only one ground-truth POI per example. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that Refine-POI achieves state-of-the-art top-k recommendation performance.