Effectiveness of LLMs in Temporal User Profiling for Recommendation
This work addresses the need for more accurate and transparent recommender systems by exploring LLMs for temporal user profiling, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM applications.
The paper tackled the problem of modeling dynamic user preferences in recommender systems by using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate distinct short-term and long-term textual summaries, finding that LLMs improve recommendation quality more in domains with active engagement (e.g., Movies&TV) than in sparser ones (e.g., Video Games).
Effectively modeling the dynamic nature of user preferences is crucial for enhancing recommendation accuracy and fostering transparency in recommender systems. Traditional user profiling often overlooks the distinction between transitory short-term interests and stable long-term preferences. This paper examines the capability of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to capture these temporal dynamics, generating richer user representations through distinct short-term and long-term textual summaries of interaction histories. Our observations suggest that while LLMs tend to improve recommendation quality in domains with more active user engagement, their benefits appear less pronounced in sparser environments. This disparity likely stems from the varying distinguishability of short-term and long-term preferences across domains; the approach shows greater utility where these temporal interests are more clearly separable (e.g., Movies\&TV) compared to domains with more stable user profiles (e.g., Video Games). This highlights a critical trade-off between enhanced performance and computational costs, suggesting context-dependent LLM application. Beyond predictive capability, this LLM-driven approach inherently provides an intrinsic potential for interpretability through its natural language profiles and attention weights. This work contributes insights into the practical capability and inherent interpretability of LLM-driven temporal user profiling, outlining new research directions for developing adaptive and transparent recommender systems.