ITDR: An Instruction Tuning Dataset for Enhancing Large Language Models in Recommendations
This work addresses the challenge of adapting LLMs to recommendation systems for researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it builds on existing instruction tuning methods.
The authors tackled the problem of large language models (LLMs) struggling with recommendation tasks due to structural data differences by constructing ITDR, an instruction tuning dataset with about 200,000 instances from 13 public datasets, which significantly enhanced the performance of mainstream open-source LLMs like GLM-4 and LLaMA-3.2 on recommendation tasks.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in natural language processing tasks. However, in the field of recommendation systems, due to the structural differences between user behavior data and natural language, LLMs struggle to effectively model the associations between user preferences and items. Although prompt-based methods can generate recommendation results, their inadequate understanding of recommendation tasks leads to constrained performance. To address this gap, in this work, we construct a sufficient instruction tuning dataset, ITDR, which encompasses 7 subtasks across two core root tasks--user-item interaction and user-item understanding. The dataset integrates data from 13 public recommendation datasets and is built using manually crafted standardized templates, comprising approximately 200,000 instances. Experimental results demonstrate that ITDR significantly enhances the performance of mainstream open-source LLMs such as GLM-4, Qwen2.5, Qwen2.5-Instruct and LLaMA-3.2 on recommendation tasks. Furthermore, we analyze the correlations between tasks and explore the impact of task descriptions and data scale on instruction tuning effectiveness. Finally, we perform comparative experiments against closed-source LLMs with substantial parameters. Our tuning dataset ITDR and the fine-tuned large recommendation models can be accessed at https://github.com/hellolzk/ITDR.