Unpaired Modality-Agnostic Generative Recommendation
This work is significant for researchers and practitioners in generative recommendation, as it enables the use of unpaired multimodal data, which is a common real-world scenario.
This paper tackles the problem of generative recommendation with multimodal data, specifically addressing the limitation of requiring item-level paired observations. They propose UnpairGR, which learns a unified semantic-ID space from paired, image-only, and text-only observations, leading to consistent improvements in recommendation performance across three benchmark datasets.
Generative Recommendation (GR) formulates recommendation as autoregressive generation over discrete semantic identifiers (IDs). Although recent multimodal GR methods improve semantic ID construction with visual and textual information, they typically require item-level paired observations, restricting tokenization to the intersection of modality availability. Moreover, incorporating unpaired observations is nontrivial because small representation shifts may cross quantization boundaries and produce incompatible identifier sequences. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{Unpair}ed Modality-Agnostic \textbf{G}enerative \textbf{R}ecommendation (UnpairGR), which learns a unified semantic-ID space from paired, image-only, and text-only observations. UnpairGR confines modality-specific processing to lightweight input projections while sharing the subsequent Transformer and residual codebooks across all observation conditions. Paired observations establish a reliability-guided cross-modal consensus, whereas unimodal observations directly refine the same representations and codes. The learned tokenizer is then fixed to provide stationary targets for a single autoregressive recommender, without feature imputation, modality-specific codebooks, or fallback mappings. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that UnpairGR consistently improves recommendation performance under both fully observed and incomplete-observation settings.