Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful reasoning engines in recommender systems, generating natural-language explanations that foster user engagement. However, their recommendation performance remains limited, as they lack exposure to collaborative user-item interaction patterns. In contrast, collaborative filtering (CF) models achieve strong performance by learning from these behavioral patterns at scale. To unify the strengths of both paradigms, we propose TWiCE-Rec (Think Wise, Collaborate Effectively), a rationale-aware LLM-based recommender that incorporates collaborative user-item interactions. In the first stage, we construct a rationale dataset by applying in-context learning with self-annotated curation. A state-of-the-art LLM is guided to generate persuasive rationales that explain the causal relationship between the user’s interaction sequence and the ground-truth next item, resulting in a curated post-hoc training dataset. In the second stage, we perform multi-task instruction-tuned adaptation—based on the rationale-augmented training dataset—comprising item description generation and both non-reasoning and reasoning-based sequential recommendation, to equip the LLM with the ability to generate rationales that reflect how user preferences align with item characteristics. Finally, we aim to enhance the LLM’s recommendation performance by incorporating user-item interaction patterns derived from the CF-Rec model. To achieve this, we propose a confidence-weighted reinforcement learning strategy that adjusts rewards in proportion to both the LLM’s prediction alignment with the ground-truth and the confidence from the pretrained CF-Rec model. Our method outperforms both CF- and LLM-Rec models on Amazon datasets in terms of recommendation performance and rationale quality. In an online A/B test, it achieved about 8% higher click-through rate than existing models, demonstrating practical value.

This paper investigates Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR), a promising method that uses information from multiple domains (more than three) to generate accurate and diverse recommendations, and takes into account the sequential nature of user interactions. The effectiveness of these systems often depends on the complex interplay among the multiple domains. In this dynamic landscape, the problem of negative transfer arises, where heterogeneous knowledge between dissimilar domains leads to performance degradation due to differences in user preferences across these domains. As a remedy, we propose a new CDSR framework that addresses the problem of negative transfer by assessing the extent of negative transfer from one domain to another and adaptively assigning low weight values to the corresponding prediction losses. To this end, the amount of negative transfer is estimated by measuring the marginal contribution of each domain to model performance based on a cooperative game theory. In addition, a hierarchical contrastive learning approach that incorporates information from the sequence of coarse-level categories into that of fine-level categories (e.g., item level) when implementing contrastive learning was developed to mitigate negative transfer. Despite the potentially low relevance between domains at the fine-level, there may be higher relevance at the category level due to its generalised and broader preferences. We show that our model is superior to prior works in terms of model performance on two real-world datasets across ten different domains.

A User Next Location Prediction (UNLP) task, which predicts the next location that a user will move to given his/her trajectory, is an indispensable task for a wide range of applications. Previous studies using large-scale trajectory datasets in a single server have achieved remarkable performance in UNLP task. However, in real-world applications, legal and ethical issues have been raised regarding privacy concerns leading to restrictions against sharing human trajectory datasets to any other server. In response, Federated Learning (FL) has emerged to address the personal privacy issue by collaboratively training multiple clients (i.e., users) and then aggregating them. While previous studies employed FL for UNLP, they are still unable to achieve reliable performance because of the heterogeneity of clients' mobility. To tackle this problem, we propose the Federated Learning for Geographic Information (FedGeo), a FL framework specialized for UNLP, which alleviates the heterogeneity of clients' mobility and guarantees personal privacy protection. Firstly, we incorporate prior global geographic adjacency information to the local client model, since the spatial correlation between locations is trained partially in each client who has only a heterogeneous subset of the overall trajectories in FL. We also introduce a novel aggregation method that minimizes the gap between client models to solve the problem of client drift caused by differences between client models when learning with their heterogeneous data. Lastly, we probabilistically exclude clients with extremely heterogeneous data from the FL process by focusing on clients who visit relatively diverse locations. We show that FedGeo is superior to other FL methods for model performance in UNLP task. We also validated our model in a real-world application using our own customers' mobile phones and the FL agent system.