Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been widely used as recommender systems, owing to their reasoning capability and effectiveness in handling cold-start items. A common approach prompts an LLM with a target user's purchase history to recommend items from a candidate set, often enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Most existing RAG approaches retrieve purchase histories of users similar to the target user; however, these histories often contain noisy or weakly relevant information and provide little or no useful information for candidate items. To address these limitations, we propose ItemRAG, a novel RAG approach that shifts focus from coarse user-history retrieval to fine-grained item-level retrieval. ItemRAG augments the description of each item in the target user's history or the candidate set by retrieving items relevant to each. To retrieve items not merely semantically similar but informative for recommendation, ItemRAG leverages co-purchase information alongside semantic information. Especially, through their careful combination, ItemRAG prioritizes more informative retrievals and also benefits cold-start items. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ItemRAG consistently outperforms existing RAG approaches under both standard and cold-start item recommendation settings.

Recipe recommendation has become an essential task in web-based food platforms. A central challenge is effectively leveraging rich multimodal features beyond user–recipe interactions. Our analysis shows that even simple uses of multimodal signals yield competitive performance, suggesting that systematic enhancement of these signals is highly promising. We propose TESMR, a 3-stage framework for recipe recommendation that progressively refines raw multimodal features into effective embeddings through: (1) content-based enhancement using foundation models with multimodal comprehension, (2) relation-based enhancement via message propagation over user–recipe interactions, and (3) learning-based enhancement through contrastive learning with learnable embeddings. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that TESMR outperforms existing methods, achieving 7–15% higher Recall@10.

In e-commerce, where users face a vast array of possible item choices, recommender systems are vital for helping them discover suitable items they might otherwise overlook. While many recommender systems primarily rely on a user's purchase history, recent multi-behavior recommender systems incorporate various auxiliary user behaviors, such as item clicks and cart additions, to enhance recommendations. Despite their overall performance gains, their effectiveness varies considerably between visited items (i.e., those a user has interacted with through auxiliary behaviors) and unvisited items (i.e., those with which the user has had no such interactions). Specifically, our analysis reveals that (1) existing multi-behavior recommender systems exhibit a significant gap in recommendation quality between the two item types (visited and unvisited items) and (2) achieving strong performance on both types with a single model architecture remains hallenging. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel multi-behavior recommender system, MEMBER. It employs a mixture-of-experts framework, with experts designed to recommend the two item types, respectively. Each expert is trained using a self-supervised method specialized for its design goal. In our comprehensive experiments, we show the effectiveness of MEMBER across both item types, achieving up to 65.46% performance gain over the best competitor in terms of Hit Ratio@20.

Bundle recommender systems aim to recommend suitable collections (i.e., bundles) of items to each user, meeting their diverse needs with all-in-one convenience. Typically, they utilize three distinct types of information: user-bundle purchase interactions (U-B view), user-item purchase interactions (U-I view), and bundle-item affiliations (B-I view). Our focus is on better integrating these three perspectives (i.e., views) to deliver more accurate bundle recommendations. Our examination of different role (main or sub-views) combinations of the views reveals two key observations: (1) the best combination varies across target users (i.e., who receive recommendations), and (2) the U-I view is relatively weak as the main role. Driven by these observations, we propose PET, which synergizes the three views through (1) personalized view weighting, (2) U-I view enhancement, and (3) two-pronged contrastive learning. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that PET significantly outperforms existing methods in all popular benchmark datasets. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/K-Kyungho/PET.

Item popularity in real-world data follows a long-tail distribution, where a few items attract most of the attention, while the majority receive much less. This disparity results in high-quality embeddings for popular (head) items, but lower-quality embeddings for unpopular (tail) items, leading to less accurate recommendations for the latter. Our observations confirm that embeddings of tail items often exhibit (1) magnitudes (i.e., norms) that are less reflective of actual popularity and (2) directions that are less effective in capturing user preferences, compared to those of head items.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as effective tools in recommender systems. Among various GNN models, LightGCN is distinguished by its simplicity and outstanding performance. Its efficiency has led to widespread adoption across different domains, including social, bundle, and multimedia recommendations. In this paper, we thoroughly examine the mechanisms of LightGCN, focusing on its strategies for scaling embeddings, aggregating neighbors, and pooling embeddings across layers. Our analysis reveals that, contrary to expectations based on its design, LightGCN suffers from inflexibility and inconsistency when applied to real-world data.